Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder Gameplay Preview

Despot’s Game takes the team building, auto combat elements from a game like Dota Autochess and thrusts it into a dungeon crawling roguelike format. The results are pretty fantastic.

The game starts you off with a standard set of puny humans and they are very puny. You’re going to want to upgrade them as fast as possible if you want to survive. The team building part is very similar to the general concept of Dota Autochess. You have a set of gear and each gear falls under a different class. For example, the shield falls under the tank class and equipping it on a puny human will turn it into a tank. There are bonuses for having different units of each class so if you had three puny humans equipped with three different tank items, you will gain the taunt ability. Different classes have different uses as well as different bonuses so you can mix and match to create a team to your liking.

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The class based bonuses are highly desirable so the game boils down to rerolling your loot until you get something you want. This costs tokens however so you have to play strategically and create a team on the fly. In addition to this, purchasing gear also takes tokens as well. You earn tokens by exploring the dungeon and defeating enemies. There is a drawback to this however, as every time you move to a new room, food is consumed based on the number of puny humans in your party. Not having enough food will cause your units to have a negative status effect, making them even more puny.

This creates a nice ebb and flow to the game play loop where you must explore enough of the dungeon to earn tokens and then strategically use those tokens to reroll loot to get the optimal team as well as enough food to keep going.

Overall, Despot’s Game is a fun and relaxing game as most of the game boils down to strategy and you have all the time in the world to plan things out carefully. The game also has a great sense of humor and you will run into some hilarious scripted sequences.