Dice Legacy

A dice based RTS. Pro: Lovely art, excellent aestetic, interesting lore. Haven't had any instability. Con: Actually playing the game. This game, though well made, suffers from some of the silliest user interface decisions I've ever seen. Lets say you want to feed your dice to restore it's durability. (Dice being a symbol for people.) You click on your dice. (Not click and drag as that will pick up all dice of the same type.) You click on the cook house, but not actually on the cook house. On the dice spaced car park out front. Then, you can either click on the food resource icon at the side of the screen. (Not click and drag as that will pick up all resources of the same type.) and park the food next to the dice. As an alternative you can Shift+Click to put the first suitable dice in place, and then shift+click on the food slot to do the same. You'll have to do this a lot. So instead of: Choose the dice, choose the task as a two step process. You have: Choose the dice, find the building on the map, find the carpark, place the dice. Shift+Click the resources into place. Repeat however many times you need to take the action. Thats 4-6 steps, compared to 2 steps. 2 or 3 times more clicking in necesary. Want food? Grow wheat. (Till, Plant, Reap. 3 lots of dice placement.) Mill the wheat. (Place dice, place wheat, place wheat.) You are managing 12 dice, (or more*) constantly searching for useful things for each dice to do based on the roll. You will be hunting up and down the map. (Since your base is at the bottom, and the enemies base is up to the top.) Some dice will forage, some dice will work at home. The carparks will hide behind things in the foreground as well, taller buildings will obscure them. The game gives things like adjacency bonuses so you will want to build your town close together. Maybe it's better to play with controller? Oh wait, there's no controller support. (At the time of writing depsite being released on console.) *Task Juggling.

Have you played the board game Stone Age? Or Agricola? These are "worker placement" games, where on each turn you place your workers, they perform actions, you get stuff, and then you take your workers back for the next round. Now combine a worker-placement game with an RTS, and you have Dice Legacy. Your workers are actual dice, with a variety of faces. You can place them based on what's on the top face. Or you can roll to get something different. But each roll removes 1 durability from your dice (they have a max of 16), so you need to "feed" your dice to get their durability back up; a die at 0 durability disappears forever if rolled. You start with 5, but you can increase to a pool of 12 dice eventually. You can also convert them to different kinds (soldier, monk, citizen) with different strengths. Some dice have numbers on a face in addition to the symbol, which gives them extra power; a die with "2" on a face can substitute for two normal dice with that face. What do the dice do? They harvest wood, stone, iron, herbs. They grow wheat in fields, harvest it, and then bake it into bread, or turn it into ale. They build extra buildings and explore the map further. And they fight. At an ever-increasing speed, you'll be beset with bad guys from the other end of the map whom you'll need to fight with sword-faced dice. By the way, your pool of dice has 12 slots, but you can actually have as many dice as you can manage to juggle at once. If you end up with more than 12 dice in your pool, you'll need to discard some, but if you can manage to keep sending out dice and only keep a few at home at a time, you can have as many as you can manage. This makes things more stressful than an RTS, because you have the pressure of keeping your "workers" busy. You'll need to make use of what you have rather than incessantly rolling. It's not a relaxing game. You'll fail a lot. But with practice, you'll get it. Is it fun? I think it's fun. Hectic, but fun.

The game looks and feels decent. A nice "city builder" type of game with a very unique gameplay mechanic based on dice-workers and worker placement on a weird but interesting "circular world". It comes with a decent tutorial and four scenarios to play with, giving you plenty of hours of gameplay. The good: - unique world - unique gameplay concept (dice workers) - varied tech tree - interesting and innovative - well designed - well made The bad: - the tutorial stops short of explaining the core strategy - if you are not using the core strategy, you will have a very bad time and you will lose a lot. - after you mastered the core strategy the game difficulty suddenly drops, a lot - not much replayability after the first 2 wins. The conclusion: A fresh, nice looking, solid game, with an unique gameplay. A very well crafted game that will keep you entertained for a week or so. Once you have mastered the core strategy and the tech tree, the game difficulty drops a lot and becomes somewhat repetitive.

Positives: - Graphics, music, ring-world idea - Tutorial that is actually useful - Complex strategy allowing a lot of approaches - Thoroughly thought out base game mechanics - Well approached bit of mystery - Only a few non-fatal bugs right after release - Overall game-play feel Negatives: - Tutorial / Help does not explain a lot of details you really wish you would know. Neutral facts: - Only a little of content Technically it is just a single game mode repeating over and over with option to add one of several challenges Review: This is a game of a distinctive style. It may take failing hard several times before you will learn basics. It reminds me games like Tropico, in which you have to balance the happiness of all of your citizens; when you fail to satisfy them you'll loose so fast you won't know where it came from. At the same time the citizen happiness is far from being the core of the game. The core is a fast-paced real-time strategy, which puts a lot of pressure on you, while requiring to keep everything in the balance: workers, research, army and a need for expansion to reach more resources. The game specifically encourages you to experiment and after number of failed and won games, I must admit there is a good amount of place to experiment. At the beginning, I felt a bit frustrated. but after about 3 failed games, I've learned enough to be able to win with confidence several game modes on hard difficulty with ascended dice, leaving only few last modes and hardest difficulty as a final challenge. I do not resonate with a flood of other reviews speaking of _incredible_ frustration and difficulty. The game style sure isn't for everybody, but every game needs practice. And even between casual players that thinks they know the game thoroughly (e.g. StarCraft) and the abilities of ranked players is a _great_ difference. The game feels full, complete, even though a it is a small game. I give 4/5 stars to mark a space for improvements in future patches.