Starts strong, falls hard
Idea of this game is interesting, but it falls in execution. Its systems are boring, its gameplay is repetitive and shallow. Game is good for several hours of fun, but it doesn’t justify its high price for worthwhile content it has.
☠️It is simply not fun☠️
Imagine a roguelite where only 1/3 of players had completed a single run. Would you think that is a successful rogue-lite? A game about repetitive gameplay loops which is ought to engage player by making him want to complete many more runs in the future? Imagine those statistics for something like Vampire Survivors! There is no doubt that Despot’s Game fails as a game and it follows the trend of other games of this studio. Nice ideas on a surface, interesting presentation, fail as a game completely.
PVP
This game has an interesting system where you send your party which survives to compete with other such parties. However, system is left unsatisfactory due to its execution. It automatically places you with the best players in the game which results you into being steamrolled. There is nothing you can do. This is just not fun feeling engaging with a part of gameplay where you cannot do anything at all to influence your odds.
So many choices…
Game tries to spice up its dungeon with stories and events which gives you bonuses or negative effects. While those little stories are well written, the problem is that player cannot know the outcome of his choises. There can be very powerful boons or detrimental effects under those choices. It adds nothing to the gameplay outside of RNG. An experienced player will memorize all the choices. As for a new player, the optimal move is to open a wiki and read the right choices every time one even pops up. This utterly destroys gameplay. This studio is known to push such systems and in other of their game which likewise, annihilates gameplay and in that game. It is a general trend with this studio. Nice ideas on paper, utterly horrible implementation.
Imbalance
What is of a game, it is imbalanced. Dead easy rooms combined with DPS check rooms. This is one example of a room which can bleed you humans:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3273820606
There is another with cabbages. These difficulty spikes come out of nowhere and usually they won’t cause you to lose. However, they cause you to lose experienced humans and sometimes their equipment. Losing something important through attrition might be as well as game over as this game is solely about scalling out of proportion for auto-battling against other people. It will never be fixed, because hardcore gamers (and developers) already scalled past any room being a challenge while most people will have to experience how imbalanced this game is.
📋Inherent Gameplay Problems📋
Auto-battles all have one inherent problem. It is supposed to be about influencing battles with your decisions, but in reality you cannot see what the fuck is happening. It becomes one giant incomprehensible mess. Outside of most basic of interactions like super-duper tanky tank being at the front, you cannot really influence game a lot with clever positioning and choices. Just take one look at it. A horrible, polluted mess which just spews particles all over the screen:
Entire gameplay of this game signifies this problem. Placement of your troops, choosing which upgrades to get doesn’t matter at all. It is all about meta gaming. Getting broken mutation which just multiply your humans power. In the end, you get cheap upgrades which 2x their health and this causes battles to be incomprehensible mess of statistics. At that point, you are not actively playing as getting most broken combos available and failing the game in 5 minutes, because RNG didn’t gave you the optimal start.
In the end
It is a game with a great atmosphere and an idea. However, it fails at its execution. There isn’t a single thing which is wrong, it is rather everything is wrong and it creates a feeling which pushes away you from a game after the initial hype wears off. Game would be fun for several hours, but at this price point, I cannot recommend it.