PREVIEW : Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder (PC)
Konfa Games’ Despot’s Game is a rogue-like battle simulation game. You command a group of useless people who have awoken in a strange otherworldly maze with no memory, a few weapons, and only one aim in mind: to survive. Unfortunately, because sacrifice is the word of the game, obtaining that aim isn’t an option. You’ll build up your army, equip and train them for war, and then send them out to kill all of the opposing troops before they kill all of yours.
Despot’s Game is visually similar to two of my all-time favourite rogue-likes: The Binding of Isaac and FTL: Faster than Light. It also has thematic parallels to Squid Game, which is “the item that all journalists have to compare everything to in late 2021.” Despite some resemblances, Despot’s Game is a unique experience, with some truly novel gameplay and design choices. I’ve been imagining what might happen if the FTL creators experienced a horror-movie-style world-outlook-altering incident that left them damaged and disillusioned, and then proceeded to make a sequel to their genre-defining crew-managing smash-hit. For one sentence, I believe that’s enough hyphens.
You don’t have direct command over your troops. Having a gaming god like you in charge of all their actions would be far too easy for them. Instead, the game’s AI will fight all of your battles. Each of your humans attacks the nearest enemy as often as possible, attacking and using their special skills. The only thing you have control over is the formation of your army, which allows you to position your strongest melee fighters closest to the enemy’s spawn location while keeping your ranged fighters and healers at the back.
This is especially frustrating at the beginning of the game when you only have a few humans to throw against the hordes of monsters and you badly want to tell your doctor to heal warriors instead of trying to smash foes over the head with their stretcher. However, as the game advances, controlling an army of dozens of humans in the fast-paced warfare of Despot’s Game becomes impractical, thus the computer taking command makes a lot of sense.
To give your army a fighting chance against the enemy’s overwhelming numbers and behemoth-like might, you’ll need to increase both their numbers and their strength. There are various methods to level up as you move from chamber to room within the labyrinth. When you overcome a room, you are nearly always given access to a shop where you can spend the Tokens you earned throughout the battle. In these shops, you may buy naked people for a very low price, similar to what you can find on certain websites on the internet.
However, without a specialisation, these humans are quite weak and puny, so you can buy weapons to equip your humans. The sort of weapon you attach to a person determines their type (fighter, ranged, medic, and so on), and the more humans in each type, the more effective that type becomes. You’ll come across places that give a class a unique power, such as healing for a percentage of the damage caused. You may also use Tokens to level up all of your characters, allowing them to utilise their powers more frequently, have more health, and so on.
All of this combines to put you, as a player, in a middle management position, where you’re in charge of your workforce’s training and critical competencies rather than micromanaging their day-to-day combat. This is a fantastic setup, and I wholeheartedly endorse it, but I don’t believe it would harm to add a bit more complexity to the administration system. What I’ve described above is a comprehensive overview of all the tools you have at your disposal, and because they’re the only way you interact with the game, I could go into greater detail on how you use them.
Finally, extraordinary occurrences that occur as you walk between floors of the labyrinth can have an impact on your army. These are little story-focused random encounters where you’re given a problem and must choose one of several alternatives on how to deal with it. Think of FTL’s multiple-choice text adventure sections, and you’ll be close – which is terrific because those bits are fantastic, and this feels quite similar. Your decisions can result in bonuses such as bonus tokens or weapons, but they can also result in the loss of a loyal member of your army if you make the wrong ones.
Finally, extraordinary occurrences that occur as you walk between floors of the labyrinth can have an impact on your army. These are little story-focused random encounters where you’re given a problem and must choose one of several alternatives on how to deal with it. Think of FTL’s multiple-choice text adventure sections, and you’ll be close – which is terrific because those bits are fantastic, and this feels quite similar. Your decisions can result in bonuses such as bonus tokens or weapons, but they can also result in the loss of a loyal member of your army if you make the wrong ones. At Despot’s Game, I had a terrific time. It has the vibes of some of my favourite games, and while it lacks a little depth, it’s a fun and challenging rogue-like romp that’s simple to pick up and play. There are worse ways to waste your finite hours in this mortal realm than playing Despot’s Game if you can get over the ease with which you’re willing to sacrifice individual members of your army for the betterment of the collective.
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