Drop Duchy by developer Sleepy Mill Studio and publisher The Arcade Crew—PC (Steam) review written by Hayden T. with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Drop Duchy is the overachieving love child of Tetris and a grid-based city builder. It teases you with four-tile shapes dropping down from above to complete lines, and then layers in terrain types, production chains, military units, upgrade mechanics, and boss fights. Just when you think you’ve seen all it offers, it adds multi-stage campaign levels, route decisions, achievements and just enough randomization of rewards to keep you guessing. Oh, and it also brutally defeats you if you’re not paying attention, ending your progress and sending you back to the start to try again using any goodies you unlocked during your now-failed attempt.
The basics of Drop Duchy start out simple: a Tetris-like grid where pieces appear at the top and can be rotated and moved side to side by the player as they drop down towards the bottom row by row. Once it touches another piece that blocks it from moving further, its position is locked in place, and any special actions occur - if it creates an unbroken horizontal row, the player receives resources (used later for upgrades) for each tile in the row. If multiple rows are completed by the single piece, the total rewards are increased. A key difference from Tetris is here, though, as completed rows don’t disappear, they hang around filling up the board and affecting later tiles. Each round has twenty pieces split between Plains and Forest, and after those are placed the round ends and you get to use the rewards you collected.
Next, you start getting special tiles that don’t conform to the 4-space rules, but instead interact with whatever tiles are around them once dropped into place. Farms convert plains into fields, woodcutters convert forest into plains, and they all generally produce extra resources when they do. Still feels pretty simple, like “Tetris Plus”. The levels get a little trickier as your own tiles add to the stack of 20 terrain pieces, so you’ve got more to fit onto the grid.
Then you add in the military. Military buildings come with a combination of a fixed garrison strength or strength that is accumulated based on the terrain you place them next to. They generally make one of three types of troops, which sidebar explanations say operate in a rock-paper-scissors style: Swords beat Arrows, Arrows beat Axes, and Axes beat Swords. Not a huge jump here, until you realize that you’re not just placing your own military buildings to maximize your gains, you also have to place tiles that contain enemy buildings which you try to minimize the gains from! Now the pressure starts to ratchet up, as a moment’s inattention can place an enemy in a strong position or drop your own in a bad spot by accident. Oh, and those enemy tiles also add to the count of pieces for the level, diluting the terrain bits and forcing you to pay ever more attention to placement to fix everything in.
Now that we have friendly and enemy troops on the board though, we have to have a way to resolve the fight. Drop Duchy not only puts the generation of force strength into the player’s hands through where you chose to drop the tiles, but actually lets you try to figure out the best way to fight the battle at the end, too! Each tile that generate troops shows its strength at the end of the round, and it is up to the player to choose the order in which each stack (friend or foe) moves to engage each other. Using the rock-paper-scissors strengths and weaknesses, it's up to you to figure out who should fight and in which order to leave you victorious.
Assuming you survive the round, you’ll have a chance to collect new buildings by choosing one of three randomized cards after the battle. Then, it's off to upgrade buildings if you can afford it, upgrading the radius they impact, the strength of troops they recruit, or the resources they generate for future use. Duplicate buildings can be used or sold off for resources, and soon enough you’ll be diving into the next round with your new and improved tiles in the pile.
As
things layer on, you’ll quickly find yourself in a boss fight. Yes,
that’s right, a boss fight in Tetris. Boss fights here are
represented by a horizontal wall across the playing field that shows
the enemy troop strength. You’ll need to accumulate enough troops
of your own without letting the grid fill up past the wall to win,
which can be harder than you might expect as terrain pieces and enemy
military tiles come raining down. The good news is that its possible
to move the boss wall up the grid, giving you more space to lay tiles
in. The bad news is this is only possible when the enemy gains
troops, so once again its a balancing act to try to place enemy tiles
in their weakest positions (raising the wall up the grid for minimum
cost) while maximizing your own gains. Outright winning here doesn’t
have to be the objective though, you just need to lose by a close
enough margin that you can absorb the damage into your own health
pool (did I mention that was a thing? That’s a thing, which can be
restored between rounds by spending resources.). Survive the fight
and you’ve beaten the level and can move onwards.
Just
when you think you’re hot stuff though, Drop Duchy is ready for
you. Additional terrain variations can make your highly upgraded
buildings less effective, and growing numbers of enemy tiles make it
ever harder to avoid dropping them in good positions.
Eventually, you’ll fail.
Failure leads you back to the beginning in true Tetris style, however, but with extra bonuses to your starting resources and building selections based on what you managed to achieve in your runs so far. This lets you slowly improve with each run, hopefully propelling you further and further in the game each time.
In the end, Drop Duchy left me feeling both excited and battered, and I’m writing this review fresh off a crushing defeat. I’ll be back for another run tomorrow, learning how to adapt and gaining strength each time. If there was one thing I’d wish for, however, it would be that Drop Duchy released a mobile version. Currently on Steam and Epic for PC, this feels like a game that would be a natural fit for mobile devices or consoles. I can absolutely see myself laying in bed, playing Drop Duchy on my phone or undocked Switch for hours instead of getting sleep. Sadly, for now I’ll have to be content to play it on my laptop, hoping that the empty spot in bed and light shining from my home office late into the night doesn’t annoy my wife too much!
Getting into the nuts and bolts, Drop Duchy isn’t a game that will be setting records for graphical realism or lauded for groundbreaking audio design. Its visual style is clear and accessible, with lots of available descriptions and tips on the sidebar of the screen to help the player make their choices. Audio does what it needs to do, immersing you into the game and giving you cues when things happen to reinforce the visuals. It also doesn’t seem to spend a huge amount of time trying to tell a detailed, immersive story - it does enough to set the scene and tie rounds together, and really that is all that a game of this style really requires. Where Drop Duchy has its strength is the gameplay mechanics I’ve talked about above, which mixes deceptively simple concepts of grid dropping and tile adjacency into the foundation of a game that looks set to become my go-to break from heavy-thinking city builders and factory games like Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, SatisFactory, Factorio and Captain of Industry.
Summary
Bottom line: Drop Duchy is a solid buy on PC via Steam or Epic that feels like it is crying out for a port to console and mobile platforms in the future. Built on the bones of Tetris, this is a game that builds you up, rewards you for your achievements, and then dashes your dreams in a way that makes you want to come back and try again. Excellent for a casual gaming break, and sure to appeal to players looking for fun in bite-sized doses.
Score: 8.5 / 10
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