TL;DR summary - Not a sufficiently compelling game for an expert of the genre because of its simplicity. The lack of story / setting left me feeling the cute frog-theme aesthetics to be vapid. Mechanically simplistic, perhaps good for someone completely new to the genre, but others (like myself) will see it as a step too far back. It was too mechanically and thematically unfulfilling to me, so I don't recommend it.
Full text review:
So I haven't played that long, for sure, having only just completely a D3 run but only 10% of players seem to have the achievement for doing so. D4 is 6%, I'm sure I could do that in a single try as well, but I don't feel like doing that before posting this specific review. I may yet still play more of this game, we shall see. Still, enough to get a feel for some of the mechanics, and I am a veteran of about a dozen DBRLs (and countless more RLites and true RLs). I think my problem with this game won't be aliviated by increasing ascension difficulties, because my problem isn’t really with the difficulty. Its with the way the game is presenting itself.
Lets just go through a modestly small list of gripes.
This game has no setting or story, or even the pretense of one. Like, sure its fine for there to be a bare minimum in such games, but I mean that the thematic also lacks charm. It just kind of happens to ‘be’ dice and frogs, and enemies are insects and vermin. So when I beat the last boss and the screen goes FULL white and it says ‘it feels like time is tearing itself apart around you’ and it invites you to try endless mode, its apropos of nothing. I don't know the Duke boss's motives, why he exists, why disappearing would be curious, or why we are even fighting. I don't even know what kind of world the game takes place in in the slightest. There’s no context for why events contain the themes they do, which gives it (and I can’t believe I’m saying this is a critique) an ‘indie vibe.’ Which is to say, JUST the vibes. I love indie games and I primarily play them, but... this is *just* indie vibes. Or maybe it's just the metaphorical scent of indie, perhaps. LaCroix of indie. Lets just move on from the metaphors Its made to look indie and I cannot critique the artists for choosing their mode, but I feel no intent in what is created. As an artist and consumer of art myself, it feels vapidly cutely frog-themed merely for its own sake, and I personally just don’t like that. It's NOT at all wrong to make that kind of art, and I will never call it invalid, I'm only speaking to the kind of things I want to consume in games. This lacks the meat of what I enjoy. And it doesn't have to be a lot, I like having even a tiny bit of a goofy ‘Hey heres a cool idea I came up with’ from the dev to bring the mechanics and thematics together. This lacks that. Maybe its coming later? Its not here now. See above.
This combines with the method of gameplay. Dice don’t thematically interact with the story in this at all, and plenty of games do. Its far from impossible. One of them, Astrea: Six Sided Oracles is another DieBRL where dice and powers DO thematically relate to the character in ways much more than this game's plain D4 to D8s, with their names and effects of ‘Block, attack, boost’ and some number changers. The few mechanically interesting dice do things like copy other dice, or give you extra buff stacks of a very VERY simple nature (draws, rerolls, persist defense).
Compare to Astrea, where sure you have attack defend heal, but also the starting character has unique-to-them buffs such as : “Change bad dice faces into good ones”, “Change a dice value of 1 to X”, “When you make a bad dice into a good dice, deal damage”, “Change an enemy action into self-heal”, “Boost your own bad dice faces MUCH higher”, “Every time you play risky dice, do damage or heal”, “Make the dice buffing better”, “Give yourself bad dice on purpose and do a lot of damage when you play them.” And more! Enemies do too! In DieITDungeon, enemies rarely have interesting interactions of their own. Sometimes you can turn their penalties positive, but it’s uncompelling. The most interesting thing you do in this game on the first character is play dice that boost the tile they’re played on for the rest of the fight, and you will be doing this a lot because NOT doing it will make the game take forever. Again, haven’t gone high ascensions, but I’m really not compelled. (And for Astrea, at least pre-rebalance patch where max ascension was VERY hard, I was compelled the entire way). Studying what other games have done and innovating is interesting, but how this has done it in ways that feel miniscule, hardly a step forward in any direction. Its Dice the Spire, if at its best. That would be a huge compliment perhaps, but its not reaching STS levels of compelling decision making, ever. Because I'm exploding the entire enemy encounter in 2-3 turns and if it takes longer than that because my rolls are bad, whatever action my enemy might be taking isn't meaningful because on D3 and below I'm healing twice my max HP every turn of combat in at least half my runs. And thats only SLIGHT hyperbole.
Do you get the idea? If you’ve played a lot of DBRLs, you will have found yourself much more complex games, more thematic games, and its hard to then play a game in this genre that just… feels indie-cute for no reason with no setting and “wow the dice I got is called ‘Group attack’, it deals 1-6 damage +3, and I upgraded it to draw one more” levels of vapidness.
So, yeah I mean the game is fine but its not compelling and I don’t find myself wanting to play it. If its your first Die based roguelite deck builder, YES by all means play this game. If you’re a vet of STS / VotV / Astrea etc, probably not for you.
