Drop Duchy review – a sprawling challenge disguised as a block-dropping puzzler

Arcade Crew/Sleepy Mill Studio; PCBuild a card deck of landscape features; organise your territory on a Tetris-like playfield; battle enemies and bosses to progress. It might sound complicated, but this is an ingenious experiment in game design by combinationThe indie video game scene is currently dominated by two unassailable genre titans: the rogue-like and the deck-builder. The first is a type of action adventure in which players explore procedurally generated landscapes, where they battle enemies, level up and then die – whereupon they start all over again from scratch. The latter is about building decks of collectible cards (think Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, but digital) and fighting with them. Titles that combine both in interesting ways – such as Balatro and Slay the Spire – can become huge crossover hits. But the market is getting saturated and so developers are having to find new genres to mix into this potent game design cocktail.Hence Drop Duchy, a game that attempts to combine the rogue-like deck-builder with … Tetris. Yes, the action takes place on a playfield in which differently shaped objects drop from the top of the screen to the bottom – except here, each object is either a landscape-type or a building, and the player isn’t only trying to create unbroken lines, they’re trying to place these units effectively to generate resources. Place a farm near a grassy plain block, for example, and it will produce wheat. Put a wooden fortress near a forest and it will generate farmland and swordsmen. When you complete a line, it doesn’t disappear: instead, it multiplies the resources you’re gathering. Why do you need the aforementioned soldiers? Well, alongside placing your own military bases, you also have to find space for random enemy bases, too, and at the end of the round, when all the blocks have been placed, you enter a combat sequence in which you align your military units to take on your foe. Continue reading...

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