Drop Duchy Review – Indie Rogue-Lite Strategy Game

 In a market currently dominated by indie rogue-lites, Drop Duchy is an indie game that picks the best elements from some absolute classics and forges these into a unique, compelling and challenging new format. Think Tetris X Carcassonne X Dorf Romantik X Age of Empires, and you’ll be some way to understanding what Drop Duchy has to offer. But truly, this game is something entirely new and special in its own right.

“Drop Duchy is an indie game that picks the best elements from some absolute classics and forges these into a unique, compelling and challenging new format.”

The fundamentals of Drop Duchy are simple. You simply drop a series of terrain or building tetromino-style tiles into the drop zone, attempting to forge combinations which provide resources, soldiers, or other useful boons. Completing lines provides resources such as food, wood, or stone, and at the end of the drop phase, provided you are not fortunate enough to find yourself in a “peaceful zone”, you receive soldiers of different classes and numbers based on the adjacency conditions you have managed to meet.

Soldiers, as you may expect, come in three classes – swordsmen, archers, and heavy axemen. Each has a type matchup advantage and disadvantage, so finding the right combination you need in order to dispatch your opponents is key. That’s right – unfortunately for you, some of the tiles you are forced to drop are enemy buildings which generate opposing soldiers, and defeating these is key to maintaining your overall health.

Drop Duchy starts with a fairly basic strategy game formula – collect resources, build an army, and win the battle. But as you progress, greater challenges and more complex technologies come into play, which fundamentally mix up the gameplay. Bosses stray from the usual type matchup system and introduce new challenges and variables to bypass them. New terrain emerges, whilst those you have become familiar with begin to disappear. Keeping a lean deck and strategy is, therefore, key to long-term success. And deeper still, elements like constellation powers and increasingly complex adjacency bonuses ensure that what begins as a pleasant and simple game gently develops into a higher-level, deeper-thinking strategy challenge.

It is this evolution of gameplay, and Drop Duchy’s refusal to be bound by the norms of the genres it dips into, that makes this game some engaging and unique to play. There are equal elements of strategy and chance to balance, hard decisions are forced upon you, and you cannot simply rely on one winning strategy for an entire run because of the gameplay evolutions which develop. Certainly, the game I went in expecting was not the game that I found I had experienced after a few hours playing.

This latter point is perhaps the one flaw of Drop Duchy. It presents in a fairly unassuming way which is likely to attract a more casual player base and, unfortunately, perhaps not immediately market itself to more hardcore genre fans who would largely enjoy it. There is a level of complexity to the game which only truly emerges a few hours in, and from the game’s visuals you really don’t see it coming…

Drop Duchy enters into a competitive marketplace for its genres, but achieves what few of its competitors are able to. The game offers a unique, accessible, yet deep experience which is alluring in its simplicity at a base level and challenging to any level of player as the game develops. It’s the perfect evening rouge-lite strategy game after a busy day of work, when something as heavy as either genre can traditionally produce doesn’t quite fit the bill. A wholly satisfying and logic-testing title with great potential if it can reach its true target audience, Drop Duchy should be an easy addition to genre fans’ libraries.

Drop Duchy DLC Trailer

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Game code was provided by the Publisher.