Xandor's Stuff - Drop Duchy Review

Drop Duchy

Score: 3.5/5

Drop duchy is a neat little tetris-y roguelike. You do the typical 3-acts with bosses, event rooms, shops, thing that's so common to the genre now, but the twist is that the fights are tetris. The pieces all have different terrain types, and as you go along, you build out a deck of building cards (which are of course upgradable) that either get you more resources, or spawn fighters at the end of the round to do battle with. The fights are pretty basic rock-paper-scissors, but I liked that you pick the order you fight enemy camps in, so its not a total brain-off experience after you've done all your tetris-ing.

The music is nice, kinda standard fantasy faire. Nothing super notable, but not bad to my ear. The art style is pretty decent, though the Unreal Engine-y ness does poke through around some of the edges.

I had fun getting to grips with the right way to tetris for maximal resources/fighters. Enemy buildings caring about which row they're in, or what they're adjacent to also spiced up things a fun amount to me. I'm a sucker for anything with adjacency bonuses, so I had a pretty fun time with this one. There's a good amount of meta-progression here too, with a lot of buildings and passive bonuses to unlock. Some of the balance is a bit funny, with some buildings and techs (to me) seeming way more powerful than other options, but that's a bit of a minor gripe I feel.

I'd recommend Drop Duchy if you're a fan of the roguelite game structure and want to try out a tetris-twist on it, or are an adjacency-bonus board game sicko. Got this one on sale and I feel like I got my money's worth for sure.