Drop Duchy – Complete Edition dropped onto Xbox Game Pass early this year, so I decided to take a look at this strange puzzle/deck building/rogue-lite. What I found intrigued me.
If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you’ve probably realised by now I tend to start with some variation of “so the gameplay loop is simple”. The gameplay loop in Drop Duchy is definitely not simple. The aim of the game is to progress through a series of encounters in a run and beat three bosses without losing all your defense. You visit a number of locations throughout a run, some are shops or events, but most are territories. These are more often than not occupied by enemies, but we will get to that in a minute.
If you go to an unoccupied territory, you drop down classic uncopyrighted shapes composed of four blocks in familiar patterns. You can rotate them, shunt them… you know the drill. Drop Duchy isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how the basics go. It does heap a whole lot of interest on top of that though. The blocks are composed of different terrain, and when you make a line, you “explore” and collect resources based on the terrain. Do this to multiple lines at once, you get a multiplier.
Following along? As well as terrain blocks, you also have production buildings which change terrain types or harvest additional materials, and military buildings which generate units based on their own activation criteria. You remember how I said I’d get back to the enemies? Here we go.
If you are in an occupied territory, you’ll have friendly and enemy military buildings to place as well as terrain and production. Once you’ve placed every block in a given territory, you have to resolve a combat phase. To do this, you draw a line connecting every single military building on the finished map to complete a fight. There’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic governing the three unit types that multiplies things, but basically it’s like those fake game adverts you see where you plot the path to make sure the friendly number is always bigger. If the friendlies win at the end, you get gold equal to the amount remaining. If the enemies win, you lose defense equal to that amount.
Between territories you can spend resources to upgrade buildings and gain additional slots to take more buildings into a fight, and managing your load out of buildings is important. Between runs there are challenges to unlock new factions and improve the ones you have, an upgrade tree to spend points on, and it provides a fairly complex package.
I don’t want to spend the whole review purely focusing on mechanics, and if all this feels a little overwhelming to read, I promise Drop Duchy does a wonderful job walking you through it step by step. The tutorial gives you the basics, but your first run will also be filled with hints and tips to help explain the things you didn’t encounter in the tutorial.
Music and sound effects are basic but atmospheric. I won’t be going to listen to them after I play, but they aren’t offensive in any way. Much the same with the art style, it gets the job done but I’m not buying an art book.
As with all block puzzle games, luck does play a large element in how the pieces fall, and it is frustrating to watch a well planned strategy melt down because of this. This is the learning curve of the game though, and feeling yourself steer out of a tight corner or manage to pull off a great combo to dominate an enemy is incredibly satisfying.
I picked Drop Duchy up purely on a whim, not even planning to review it until I felt it bite at my brain, but The Arcade Crew have polished quite a little gem here and I think it deserves recognition. If you like balancing resources and having to think about strategy on the fly, whether as a puzzle nerd or an RTS nut, this might be worth your time!
Drop Duchy – Complete Edition was reviewed on Xbox Series X but is also available on Steam.
