Despot’s Game

Genre: Strategy / Roguelike

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Despot’s Game, released in 2022 on PC and Xbox One, and ported to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in 2023, is a bit of an odd game, with a mix of genres that mostly includes Roguelike and Strategy elements, with some RPG elements as well. As far as I can tell, this is chronologically the second release in the series, coming after 2018’s Despotism 3K, but that game describes itself as the prequel to Despot’s Game, so… maybe there’s a previous release of Despot’s Game I’m not seeing?

In any case, Despot’s Game works well enough as a self-contained game, with the plot apparently involving a malicious AI forcing hordes of faceless human slaves through a gauntlet of battles as they try to escape. Players manage their group of humans as they work their way through the game’s randomized rooms with enemy encounters, shops to use currency you’ve earned to recruit and equip more humans, and other shops to buy the food for your humans that is consumed every time you move from one room to another.

Combat in the game starts with players arranging their humans in what will ideally be the best formation before choosing to kick off combat, where everything will play out in real-time automatically, without further input from the player. This means that everything will come down to how well you arranged and equipped your crew before heading into battle.

Unfortunately, there are numerous problems with this. While the game does provide players with a pretty wide variety of equippable weapons with which to outfit your fighters, it doesn’t make it clear which weapons are melee weapons and which are projectile weapons, something that could have been helpful when weapons include things like a pretzel or a stage magician’s hat. What’s more, while you can see stats for these weapons before buying them, these stats aren’t displayed in a way that makes it clear what these weapons strengths and weaknesses are compared to other weapons – there’s not RPG-style “compare” option to weigh one weapon’s stats against another.

Another problem is that while you can arrange your fighters how you want prior to battle, this hardly matters as you have no control over their battle tactics. Maybe you want your unarmed humans to stay in the back to avoid taking damage while you have shield-bearers take the front line just ahead of melee fighters… but what will actually end up happening when battle starts is that anyone with melee attacks will mindlessly rush the enemy while projectile-users will get in range and then stay in place while they very slowly take shots at enemies. Needless to say, this really detracts from any kind of strategy your placement will have.

Speaking of a lack of strategy, the game doesn’t even let you know what enemies you’ll be fighting prior to battle, so you don’t even have the benefit of being able to outfit your crew with weapons you think will best suit those enemies. All you can do is try to set your characters up in a way that seems as ideal as possible and then let them loose and hope.

The problems this game has extend to the control interface, which is odd, unintuitive, and at times non-responsive. Just trying to highlight a menu option or select a specific human to inspect stats or equip a weapon can be a frustrating ordeal that depends in part on what the last thing you did was, and I found myself having to rely on an odd quirk of pressing a button to swap to the useless on-screen cursor and then switch back just to reset the controls when they got stuck. At the very least, this game needed more playtesting before releasing on Nintendo Switch, but simply put I think the controls here are poorly-designed and buggy.

All of this is on top of a presentation that uses 2D pixel art visuals that aren’t especially impressive and feature a lot of bland, repetitive backgrounds. I do appreciate that the wide variety of different weapon types all make for some interesting little animations on the humans, though. And these visuals are backed by a synthesized soundtrack that works well enough for the game’s dystopian futuristic setting, but aren’t at all memorable.

Overall, I like some of the ideas at work in Despot’s Game, and the idea of outfitting and arranging your own little army in a Roguelike really does sound interesting, but this is unfortunately a Strategy game where the player’s ability to strategize is sabotaged at every turn, not only completely removing any options in combat, but hobbling players when it comes to choices outside of combat as well. And add to this the nasty control and interface issues this game has on Nintendo Switch, and I simply cannot recommend it.

tl;dr – Despot’s Game is a game that combines Roguelike and Strategy elements in a setting where players command a horde of humans being put through a mazelike gauntlet of enemies by an evil AI. There are some really original ideas here, but the complete lack of control in battles and the many ways the game sabotages your ability to make strategic choices really hurts this game. Even worse, the control interface on Nintendo Switch is absolutely disastrous. While I really like some of the ideas this game presents, the game itself is an absolute mess.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}