Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder PC Preview

Humans, such malleable creatures. We can fit into any role given the right training but in Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder that training can mean life or death. As a puny human, you wake up in a strange post-apocalyptic labyrinth without any clothes, no memories, a bunch of weapons, and told to survive. With you guiding these poor souls through rooms of horrors attempting to keep as many alive as possible. The concept is simple but it becomes incredibly difficult very quickly but after failure, you'll want to try again.

Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder's concept is easy, build an army using the options available to survive each procedurally-generated labyrinth. The maze is full of monsters and you'll need to construct a team of humans to defeat each room. The structure is straightforward to understand but as you progress and learn of the challenges ahead those simple concepts eventually lead to intricate planning for future rooms.

Your humans have nothing so you must equip them with weapons to combat the hordes in the labyrinth. In specific rooms, you'll be given the ability to purchase your army with each weapon separated into classes that can be upgraded by pooling together similar classes with different weapons. Each option requires Tokens, including new humans, and keeping your humans' alive means they'll get stronger. Since humans don't recover health outside of battle keeping everyone alive can become difficult. So ensuring a healthy team of DPS, tanks, debuffs, buffers, healers, and magic casters are essential. You can store weapons as dead humans will sometimes drop their weapons, allowing you to reuse them but not all the time. The developers also included some cool references to popular entertainment including One-Punch Man, Sailor Moon, and Star Wars based on the weapons.

Humans need to eat so each time you travel to a new room food is used. Once exhausted you have a finite amount of moves before your army starts dying. You can replenish food using Tokens by purchasing food in certain rooms but the larger your army the more food will be needed. This means you cannot just bullrush enemies and must manage your Tokens for not just weapons and humans but food as well.

Battles are automatic but your humans are effective at fighting. They'll do exactly what is necessary against the enemies. As you go deeper enemies get more powerful and each section ends with a difficult boss fight. All of this, the team building, food management, and risk-taking all combined for intense strategy as you manage the risk for future encounters trying to put as much favor in your human slaves as possible. 

Not all rooms lead to enemies as some will contain mutations and unique encounters. Mutations offer new variations, both beneficial and hazardous, with more unlocking as you move forward. If you die the mutation is added to the rotation and new starting parties for completing specific objectives. Unique encounters allow for added bonuses such as helping the Reaper or finding some sick experiment. Not all are instantly beneficial and sometimes require an optional sacrifice. Rooms are labeled to offer some as to give players some planning options if food or new humans are needed but you still don't know what enemies you'll face.

Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder holds a lot of promise. The addicting systems and dynamic systems allow for endless replayability as you attempted to plan accordingly and hope luck is on your side. Your humans depend on you to live but they're just servants for your escape as you navigate the dangerous halls of the labyrinth. You can try the game right now as it has entered early access.

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed