HOW MANY DUDES?
Whenever I sit down to write a review, I have a final verdict already in mind and now the task is to make sure everyone reading my scribblings gets how I got there. I guess that is probably how it works for most if not all writers of reviews, but I felt a need to mention it because sometimes it is such a strange task to talk badly about a game you like. It’s a weird juxtaposition, a peculiar contrast of wanting to be informative and fair to the reader while also conveying that, despite the big and terrible flaws, I still am having quite a blast with this rotten title!
And this is how I feel about HOW MANY DUDES?
Because the game is extremely fun and has no bullshit attached to it. It’s as direct as its title suggests. You’re facing some sort of challenge scenario - be it 2 grizzly bears and a bunch of porcupines or like half a thousand toddlers - and being asked how many different dudes you need to bash’em into giblets. And I mean, who doesn’t love that kind of nonsense? Since time immemorial humanity asked itself those big, important questions… Who would win - The Sun or a trillion tigers? What if it was nighttime? And of course, not so long ago a dispute of one silverback gorilla versus 100 men took the internet by storm. It is not surprising that this simple, blunt premise somehow activates neurons in the brain.
HOW MANY DUDES? As a proper roguelike spices the formula up! It’s not merely a matter of sheer numbers, but types of dudes, too. And there is a solid comedic plenty. Undead dudes, ninja dudes, finance dudes, you name it. Each fella comes with innate ability and a set of powerful items you can unlock for the bunch to further polish up their strength. This kinda-sorta makes them fit into roles well known to most gamers. We have our healers, tanks, damage dealers and supports. And a well-rounded team has them all in good measure, because the brute scaling of the oh-so-many stages mean you need to constantly duke out ever growing damage while also have stellar sustain baked into your composition.
Here is the first crack in the game fun façade. Sure, you have quite a selection of dudes and lots of items to pick from, but ultimately it starts to very quickly feels like decoration.
Ultimately you always need the same solution - healers to keep your fellas from folding. A strong tank to take the aggro off. And a DPS chump with, optimally, limitless damage scaling potential. Sure, you CAN squeak by with less of one role and more of the other, there are some wackier compositions that can work and some dudes do multi-roles well enough with enough items unlocked and acquired, but the game feels somewhat… Solved. At some point you’ll have a comp that never fails you and feel low incentive to try anything else. And even if you do, the outcome feels pretty same’ish!
What doesn’t help the feeling of repetition is that there is no actual planning during a run. No worthy decisions that impact your gameplay. There is never a conundrum if you pick an easier or tougher fight - you always go for the harder one for more money, and if you are picking correct engine pieces, you’ll never suffer loses in hard fights. Or at least losses that aren’t easy to patch up, at worst. When an Underground Battle shows up, you always take it - powerful artifacts hiding there are just too strong to pass on. When Investment event jumps in, you go All In, every time, because getting your money multiplied means you’ll get more items down the line before the final arenas show up. There is a bit of tedious brainlessness to the entire process. To such a degree that if your team of fellas are well-oiled - which, again, isn’t that hard to organize! - you do not even have to use your power items. I usually save them just for boss-fights and even then, barely ever must use them, even in Golden Tier fights.
And so, we enter a rather muddled field of replayability. The first dozen or so runs feel great! You’re unlocking new things, feel that there’s some agency in your decisions, that you’re building up a little Combat Engine out of your artifacts and dudes… But each and every run you start to notice that the items and dudes, despite writing different things in their boxes of text, reach out the same sort of conclusion. There are no complex sets of debuffs or statuses. No big differences between healers or tanks. No widely different approaches to how you win your fights. It gets so automatic that even picking a reward hardly matters - just pick another artifact for your most numerous / most high tier dude until you run out of being able to pick’em. They are all just straight up power spikes, so it doesn’t matter much which you pick.
And that is a hard pit for me to chew over. See, I appreciate the humor of this game. It’s style and no-nonsense attitude, just tossing you straight into fights without any boring preambles. It has style, it has gumption! And for the first few hours it was quite a riot to keep bashing forward until I figured out the Winning Formula. And once that was in my grasp, the game rapidly fell off, no longer offering any challenge to bash my skull against. Flashy colors and dudes making funny noises became a source of frustration, not joy, as I had to play over 100 God-forsaken rounds to complete a run. Sheesh!
I must be fair here. It was good fun, but it failed to stick the landing, really bungled it up for me. I feel no desire to keep rolling with the game - it already showed me it’s dirty underbelly and sadly turned out that all those different abilities and dozens upon dozens of items do not hide a rich system of mechanical depth, but a bit of overcomplicated tic-tac-toe. Despite its bright visuals, fun premise and a few hours of simple fun of watching bigger crowds of cartoony animals getting punched by a mob of pirates and dentists, I cannot say that this game is one I’ll return to at any time in the future. I reckon there are better autobattlers out there to enjoy.
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