DICEVADERS
Here comes another entry in the spanking new VADERS cinematic universe! Seriously though, I am starting to get somewhat impressed by the team in Pengonauts. They have that thing on, and while I might struggle to define what that thing is, it is very much on and doing well. STARVADERS was a banger - and excellent rougelike deckbuilder tactics game, and even though that is a mouthful of genres, they managed to weave them expertly into a superb game. DICEVADERS is a follow up, sharing the same art style and universe, but this time we take control of the alien hordes to crush the pathetic humanity!
It’s not a sequel, though, not at all. It is a different beast, a game of it’s own - a BALATRO-inspired number-go-up engine builder, in which you’ll chase the ever growing defence score of the solar system planets and those pesky mecha pilots, trying to crush’em under the metaphorical heel of your invading armies. If you ever played a game like that, you’ll know the drill - score points, get big multiplier and scrounge up powerful synergies to make a well-oiled machine that, with consistency, can smash enormous numbers to rapidly overcome the goals set before you.
At first, I admit with a bit of reluctant shame, I was not at all impressed with DICEVADERS. After a few runs a question ringing in my ear was… is this it? That’s all the game has to offer? A heavily RNG dependant luck machine, where random draw will decide my fate? Hard to win if the game decided to just pout at me and never give me artifacts worth a damn or units that can scale up, right? And so, I am doomed to the whims of the numbers generator, and I always loathe that in a game - player agency is, for me, THE defining factor of playability. I need to feel that my decisions, my actions and my picks matter. That I am the one shaping the outcome.
It seems I was just being impatient. And, frankly, a bit dumb. The game is devious in its narrow scope and simplicity, I think. I can see a lot of potential players bouncing off when they see how little options they have each round. Three dice, merely a random reroll or a tiny budge one number up or down, on very limited resources? Gosh. And then just enough cash to buy 1-2 things each round, from a random selection of stuff that often will feel offers nothing of value to pick up!? Shameful.
But here lies the deceptive part… the game, simply put, is way cleverer than you might initially ascertain. There’s a lot of ways to tweak the odds. You can freeze items between shops. Freeze promising rolls, reroll everything else. Invest in short-term things - this is the first big blockade a new player must overcome. Your money does not carry over, if you don’t spend it in this round shop, you won’t have a surplus in the next one, so BUY things as you can. Sure, this or that artifact might look shoddy for now, but it might just be enough to carry you through earlier stages as you slowly develop your forces and strategy.
It’s a constant dance of risk versus rewards, of long-term planning. For example, I might be able to score a triple on a mostly empty column. This will waste a precious turn, give me barely any score… but that triple might crack the lock on the row, freeing it for another artifact, which is a mighty power spike later. Freezing a spell for use in a couple more rounds might also be way smarter than you thing, when you’ll finally need that position swap or sacrifice to trigger something big.
And then, something magical happens - you start to realize how well written and tightly interconnected the mechanics of this came can be. The conditions and triggers never lie or deceive and are surprisingly robust in their interactions. So, you have a powerful unit that can grant you a bucketload of mini dice on trigger? Why not place a unit before it that can grant it additional repeats? Then an artifact in that column that also gives repeats. Suddenly in the trigger phase you get that unit to trigger multiple times, and you get a round with 50 mini-dice putting your entire scoring engine into Freaky Insane’o Mode, dancing lights, bouncing tunes and huge score ramping up like crazy.
Despite a modest selection of artifacts and units, there is a hefty variety of builds here. You can make few ultra-powered units carry you. A moving swarm that keeps on re-triggering. Charged units that keep getting better, rapidly. Scoring quick and bit to ramp up Shop Rarity early on and then use it as powerful currency to hugely empower your forces. There are many routes to victory, and what makes them even more robust is the selection of your invasion leaders. There’s… quite a few of them, and each play very differently to the others. Goo Girl is a mini-dice making machine. Core can bring lots of dice to the field, making dice-empowering tactics so much more impactful. There are characters that thrive on rolling triples, on budging your units, on triggering a special mode… And each commander has its own unlockable perks, greatly modifying a run and impacting build potential!
I could keep on gushing… and so, I will! I am getting a little attached to this verse. It’s cutesy, fun, whimsical. The art style is lovely, the colours are vibrant and there’s a lot of like kind-hearted joy behind it all. Sure, we might be trying to blow up earth and such, but no hard feelings, after all, how could you be mad at this cute Goo gal? Or UWU face Core? They are just little alien cutie pies. And the units with their little sways and wobbles, have that head empty aura to them. And even though the style is so cheerful, tunes are banging and the game is rolling off lovingly, it never obscures or hides any info. User experience is flawlessly sharp, which is crucial for an engine builder game - last thing you want is to deject a player by making some interaction blurry and unclear, so it doesn’t behave and do a thing you would expect it to do.
So yeah, DICEVADERS is a great game. Does it reaches the heights of STARVADERS…? Well, no, not for me. Not because it’s worse, in any way, it’s more personal pick. I am just a sucker for tactics genre way more than this numbers-go-up one, so the previous title just appeals to me more. Otherwise, though, DICEVADERS is a collection of very well thought out mechanics and it squeezes it’s rather limited scope of toys to its absolute maximum, giving great built variety, ever-growing challenge and delightful highs that will tingle a brain the right way. It’s an excellent game, through and through, and it shows that the folks at Pengonauts know what they are doing - by now I am already anticipating their next game, because it is likely going to be another banger.
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