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
