Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder

TLDR: a somewhat shallow pve-centered autobattler with pvp at the end of a run. Great visuals, catchy music, sassy dialogue during events, which were a highlight of the game; decent variety of game modes and constant balance updates. Lacking in some qol and, if you go for 100% achievements, it overstays its welcome. Still would recommend DBS: it’s not groundbreaking, but well made. Developers definitely care about the game.
What strikes right away is a very strong visual side of the game: the pixel art and animation quality is really high, with attention to small things – looks absolutely fantastic. The music is cool and catchy.
Most of playtime is pve with a boss at the end. It’s hard to fail a run, so, even though, most of the time is spent on building your team in pve, it’s all for the 2 mins or so of pvp at the end. The run usually takes, I’d say, about 40 to 60 minutes. Then you are paired against other players who have beaten the boss and, depending on the result of, usually 5-6 battles, you take a certain position in the rankings. It’s asynchronous: you don’t need to play at the same time. During subsequent runs, if you improve on your pvp part, your standings increase. Every 4 weeks or so there is a new season and generally, if you did all right, you move up the rank and repeat the cycle.
Your basic unit is a puny human whom you upgrade with items, which promote it to a certain class. Each class has 5 item tiers. By collecting several items with different tiers of a single class, you gain that class’ special ability. The variety comes from mutations, which you pick up as rewards: these come in form of passive bonuses, can give new abilities and synergies. During a normal run you easily acquire several dozens of mutations and these affect your build in a major way. In a sense, these are your build, and your team of humans is what actualizes it in game. You also have meta progression which affects only your current run.
Combat itself involves unit positioning: it matters (especially noticeable with smaller underpowered team) but the arrangement in the final build can be lenient as long as you put everyone where they generally should be. This was my first autobattler aside from small amount of hs: battlegrounds, so could be wrong on this one.
Events are the highlight of the game. There are a lot of them: most occur at the beginning of a level and involve choosing options in dialogue that lead to different results. The writing and humor are great – enjoyed this part of the game very much. There are a dozen or so additional, level events which involve gameplay. These usually offer currency or an evolution, which is thematically connected to what an event was about. What I didn’t know for quite some time is that you can choose which level events you encounter: at levels 1,5 and 9 there is a lever in the wall. By pressing it you cycle through icons, each corresponding to a particular event. This way you can choose an event which is relevant to your build and not rely on rng.
There are several game modes present: the standard 12-level run, but there is also a shorter, 7-level version: takes less time, but levels are more packed with stuff, so in the end it all more or less evens out. There are no food modes too. Food is a cost which you pay every time you move through a maze, 1 per unit, so balancing your upkeep with how big is your party becomes important. For achievement hunters: play with food as soon as you can: certain events proc only in food runs, otherwise you won’t be able to collect all mutations. There are pve only modes too, so technically you can ignore pvp part of the game, but imo that is the most fun aspect. Balancing is also made around pvp. There is also a mode, which closely resembles tft and autochess gameplay: you fight against other players every 3 encounters. The teams are smaller and much less powerful, so the dynamics is quite different from standard runs. I played just a few runs so don’t have too much to say about that.
Its fun exploring and discovering what works, which combinations are synergetic. Your best performing build during a season is what other players will fight against when they finish the run. This also allows you to prepare for certain players, whom you know you’ll eventually fight. Building counter strategies was the most fulfilling experience during my time with the game. I didn’t get to high rank, mostly because you are gated from doing it too fast (not a skill issue, trust me;) You can only move one rank per season at max.
Note about achievements: the bottleneck is killing wheelmen. These are rare and it’s easy to have 4 or 5 runs without seeing one. There is a trick which can cut your grind time substantially, of which I learned too late. Always pick and carry a button which restarts current floor, preferably two. Once you get a wheelman, using an item will allow you to kill another one (or more. I think I had just one run with 3, rarely 2). With even better luck you can go infinite: kill the boss before encountering a wheeler. If the boss happens to drop a restart item, pick it; go kill the wheeler and reset. You’ll spawn after the boss and will be able to pick a button again. Highly suggest taking advantage of this trick if you get it: the wheelers are THAT rare.
Now for the criticism:
1)Despite many moving parts, there is not that much variety. It doesn’t take long to try all the classes and combos. Depending on the season, some builds are way stronger, which makes an amount of viable options even smaller. The strategy part of the game is not very deep. Not necessarily a negative, but I would like more depth.
2)I learned after 30+ hours that you can move with wasd. The first thing I do in any game I start is go to options, check those, and next – to controls. The game has a section with controls and shortcuts, but no wasd there, so I didn’t even consider trying that. Devs, PLEASE, inform me as a player of ALL hotkeys available in game.
3)There is no comprehensive in-game wiki. It shows all item tiers for respective classes but that’s all. So I can’t check the stats of units, I don’t know what class abilities do. Nowhere in game there is exact info on those. Sure, the game is rather casual, but it’s not that hard to include stats on all units and abilities.
4)Your opponents’ builds in king of the hill (pvp part) are not saved anywhere. I don’t need infinite storage, but at least 5-10 of latest oppos’ builds should be saved, so I could check their mutations, meta and unit positioning. This can be solved by printscreening and then alt-tabing constantly while in-game and scrolling through couple dozen similarly looking screenshots. Not convenient at all.
5)Animations are great and I watch those for several runs, but then I want to skip through everything. There is an option to speed through events which very welcome and you can increase game speed; however it’s still WAY too slow. I’d say it’s marginally faster than what I would consider the base speed of the game should be. I’d prefer maybe x2 of current max speed. I would even use skip combat option, like in HoMM. Runs take too much unnecessary time.
6)Some mutations are locked behind achievements, so I never used or encountered the wheeler one in game, because after the grind was over, I didn’t want to play anymore. Not enough variety or depth. The fix is simple: increase wheeler spawn rate or even make one guarantee to appear in any run.
Ultimately I would recommend the game. It has issues but the vibes are nice. I doubt many players will sink more than several dozen hours, but the time spent was fun. The writing, memes and references are great. Plus the game gets constant balance updates - developers definitely care. Good job!

If Steam had a sideways thumb button I'd choose that. This game is a 6/10 realistically.

Gameplay: gets stale fast, most of my hours are from achievement hunting which is becoming exhausting, especially the 100 pvp wins because you have to get an hour and a half of pve per 4 pvp rounds half of which you wont win because of bad rng or just having a non meta comp.

Vibes: the games cringe in a good way, I enjoyed the humor and the easter eggs for my first couple play throughs, the music is alright, it doesn't get annoying to listen to like many other synth soundtracks. The art style is consistent, albeit nothing to put on the fridge.

Overall get the game if its on sale for like $5, its worth doing a few runs so you can do all the quirky lil quests and have a few chuckles.

This was very fun. Pretty addictive, but not too long, depending on how you slice it. You can finish the main campaign in about five hours. Figure out all the various mechanics and synergies. After that it's about optimizing and participating in the ladder tournaments. A lot of the negative reviews are not happy with that, but if you pick this up on a discount, you'll enjoy an excellent short game.

a dopamine machine along the lines of Vampire Survivors -- and your reward at the end is seeing just how good your army stacks up against other players. this is a blast to play through, a uniquely rewarding experience that just feels better than other autobattlers on the market. great soundtrack too!

Despots game is a very good game in the esscence of it being a rougelike simulator, although i do have a few problems with the game
1. it needs more weapons
2. the game is very weird with progress. everytime you play you get better, its not a huge problem but i want to lose before making progress at least.
these 2 problems are the only problems i have with the game so i reccomend it toany fans of games like TABS the binding of issac andother rougelikes.

A fun tactical auto battler mixed into dungeon crawl. It has a lot of references pop culture and weird humor but is pretty fun.

Fun and replayable multiplayer strategy game with repetitive gameplay