Despot’s Game (Early Access) Review
If empathy towards human life is a selling point for the sorts of video games you play, then run quickly away from Despot’s Game. In this strategic auto battler, human bodies are just a number on a score sheet. Some might argue that anything war-related relegates human bodies to sentient cattle, but Despot’s Game really rides that concept through and through. A human is only as good as the improvised weapon in their hand, or the other human mouths their body can feed.
If none of that scared you away, then Konfa Games’ mix of auto-battler and roguelike might be the sort of genre kitbash that sticks with you for a while. The writing tries hard to be clever and fails as much as it succeeds, but the tactical battling, resource management, and replayability make Despot’s Game a solid single player auto battler for Teamfight Tactics fans looking for something a little less social.
Human Cattle
If you’ve played any run-based, procedurally-generated game before this one, you’ll find the format familiar. You start with an assortment of units and are tasked to traverse through a labyrinth of dangerous trials, navigating groups of deadly enemies and potentially dangerous sub objectives, and managing your upkeeps of money and food to feed your slowly growing army of hopeless humans. Between runs, you often unlock new mutations: overarching modifiers that become boons to your units in specific ways, like making their abilities fire off more often. It takes many runs and substantial accumulation of these mutations before you feel like any given run has a potential to go your way. For too long a time in the beginning, I felt like I was coasting at the whim of the random number generator, hoping that I would get a mutation useful enough to serve the units I had in my party now, and not just something I could foolishly hope to work towards later.
Parties themselves consist of humans that you recruit in specific rooms on any given floor of the deadly dungeon. Along with spending a small fee per pink fleshy war drone, you can also spend hard earned tokens on equipment to outfit them with. These weapons determine the class each human then becomes, which in turn dictates what they do in combat. Give a sword to a human, and now they’re a Fencer. Give them a bomb, and now they are a Thrower. Each has a specific role in combat, and the mixing and match of these roles is what makes the potential of each run so enticing. I spent hours trying to find ways to get the most out of specific class mix ups just to see what kind of havoc they would make on the battlefield. The results were usually mixed from a win/loss perspective, but when I succeeded, I felt brilliant (or very lucky).
Procedurally Devastated
To that point, much of the randomisation feels more oppressive than like something that can be tamed and twisted to your liking. The equipment available to buy at these little shop locations is randomised and impossible to truly predict. You’ll definitely see lower end items more often than the rare ones, but there’s no way to influence the shop to produce more of a specific type of weapon over others. This can make collecting multiple different weapons in a particular class very difficult. As in many auto battlers in this vein, having unique members of a specific unit type in your squad can unlock big bonuses for the team, but the search for some of these bonuses can feel impossible sometimes. You’re often left going after the more attainable unit bonuses often, shying away from betting big on the more unique units or classes because you often can’t afford to fail even a little bit on your journey to the exit. One bad fight could spell disaster.
The other game modes help to break this feeling up a bit. “Easy” is the same flow but enemies are a bit softer and you have more rope to experiment freely, while “Crazy” randomises everything even further, supercharging your token gain but also pitting you against endgame monsters at a whim. Game modes and starting unit parties can be unlocked by completing objectives during a run, like collecting certain amounts of a particular sort of character class or sacrificing a certain amount of humans for food. These shorter term goals really kept me going through the first several runs, as these felt far more attainable than seeing the end credits for a good long while.
I Understood That Reference!
Less entertaining is the writing. Every so often you’ll come across a room that features a dilemma requiring you to fulfill some quest or make a decision, and consistently the ones that feel like organic parts of the world—like DJ Death needing you to hunt and kill a “hater” who left his dance party early—feel funnier and more charming than hamfisted references to Harry Potter or some other pop culture. Also, why are these references even here? Is the world of Despot’s Game in a multiverse that is connected to our real world? Nothing in the game reveals or elaborates on that question, making it all feel like it’s just there for the sake of being there.
There’s also absolutely no explanation for how we even got into a scenario where humans run an apocalyptic death race against grotesque monsters. Many games like this are light on story, but a game that spends so much time referencing other fictional worlds should spend some time building their own. It may ultimately not detract from the experience Despot’s Game does well, but it is a strange distraction, nonetheless.
At its core, Despot’s Game is a solid auto battler that prizes your ability to go with the flow over your ability to manipulate the flow directly. This can lead to several hours of curious trial and error for the patient and determined tactical mind. That said, I truly wish this game didn’t feel like it was encouraging safe and samey decision making so often, but making the risks of failure far outweigh the rewards of triumph.