Tetris, Tactics and Turn-based Town building!?
The landscape of puzzle games has been diversifying a lot in recent times and sometimes a developer, like Sleepy Mill Studio decides “Hey, what if we mixed them all up and made it a rogue-like?” It’s a brave question, and one answered in their interesting new release Drop Duchy, the freshest deck-building battler! Stomp puzzles, build lines (and front-lines) and defeat your enemies in this intriguing new title!
Light in story, but not in challenge, Drop Duchy does not really have a story, a plot, or any mystery to unravel in the game. The lack of narrative focuses more on how you push your army forward across the campaign . Progression is mainly soft, unlocking more potential cards or abilities for your army by completing challenges as you try to fight through the enemy lines. It’s a unique blend of many popular styles of game that doesn’t always hit the mark, but it has its own charm that had me going back for one more attempt at the board.
Fans of Tetris will be used to the building block like tiles, that you can rotate and have some familiar, iconic shapes and yes, there are options to retain, swap and spin pieces however instead of colours, these pieces are different buildings and biomes. And that’s about where the connection to tetris ends. The real puzzle here is how your connected tiles work to take your army to victory. So let’s explore how this game works: We pick a difficulty and a deck, then you try to beat your way across the campaign maps.
As with every rogue-like, the game can be brutal as it starts out, with fewer cards and not much access to buildings, which you unlock as you travel across the map, with the sadistic RNG dictating what terrain you have to try and master to beat the actually pretty challenging bosses.
It’s a tough game and there’s not really a way to have a golden first run other than sheer luck, thanks to some brutal RNG. Despite this, Drop Duchy stands heavily on the genre trends while delivering a fresh new concept to the rogue-like gallery, but it also misses in some aspects. The overall growth is slow with permanent buffs and und unlockables being stuck behind arbitrary challenges that can be almost unfair to grind and achieve, and each of the 5 playable factions have their own unique challenges.
The real twist comes during the skirmishes as you don’t just dictate the locations of your buildings and the lay of the land, but also your enemy’s buildings. Make one small mistake – The wrong tile here or there and you could potentially end up with an enemy with military might that’s threefold your tiny little garrison.
There’s a fair few resources to manage here too. As your army travels from event to event, you come across lumber, food and gold. Completing rows in the playable scenarios nets you a few of each of these, and we can use them for trade and such to add more buildings to your deck. We can also buff our very limited building cards for larger areas of effect or higher might. There’s three types of military buildings, which follow a rock, paper scissors format, similar to genre titan Fire Emblem, with Swords, Axes and Bows forming their weapon triangle. All this is to make sure that the number of your forces at the end of the fight are higher than your enemies’ as the only time we fail is when our forces bar hits 0.
Visually though the game isn’t anything overly interesting. It’s perfectly serviceable, with each building and biome being different enough from the others in the game, and military buildings denoting their soldier type with a big blue or red badge which is mimicked in the soundtrack which features vaguely medieval fantasy style tunes and simple sound effects as we scour lands and battlefields alike. Not much of it is very noteworthy, but the studio did appear to focus more on the mechanics of the game than the presentation.
Verdict
Sleepy Mill deserves credit for their unique idea, and bringing it to the roguelike genre was a smart play for the gameplay route. It is a decent game to grip some people and great for a lunch-break or on the train, with progression being entirely built upon how much you can accomplish on each of your runs. It’s hard not to get sucked in if you’re a fan of deck builders, Tetris or roguelikes though progressing too far can overcomplicate the gameplay thanks to extra environments and mechanics that get introduced. Drop Duchy is an interesting title, that when it works, it really works, however having our entire run’s success lands largely on RNG that does get more complex as we unlock more and more options.
Where to Buy
- Nintendo eShop
#AffiliateLinks – Prices correct at time of publishing.
Credits
Written by Luke Young
Edited by Mark McAllister
Graphic Template by Paul L. Russell
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for this review.