DLC already? This soon after release and it is a single faction, this is a red flag for the future. I Really wish these was a neutral review option. Only time will tell if they will end up having lots of DLC that would require a huge investment with only mild entertainment value added per dlc.

It is a card deck builder in disguise, I do not like deck builder games

tetris but also feudalism. it is a very russian game in this way. would be cool if there was an incentive for t-spins to appeal to very lonely people such as myself.

Tutorial and UI is incomprehensible. A shame because it does seem to have some original game play mechanics but the failure to explain them lets it down and just makes the whole thing confusing and annoying.

the tetris effect i got from this game was suicidal ideation

I want to be really clear, I do love what this game is presenting as its loop. However, I find the loop after several hours to be extremely shallow. You are met with sheer cliffs of difficulty spikes between Acts, for which there is zero means for you to effectively "outsmart" your way into a win. It's planned failure to force you to return to the main menu so you can start again with a/several boosted cards at your fingertips that you unlocked naturally without even thinking about it simply for the fact that you were following what the facility says you should already be doing to maximize its effectiveness. I would hazard to say that if you weren't trying to do that every time regardless, you'd just be jeopardizing your entire run due to the RNG potential of just being served a dearth of pieces that simply won't mesh with what you need to build to win the fight on that map, and all for a silly bonus when you inevitably have to restart. I enjoy Tetris a lot. I tend to feel clever when I manage to make the lines, and the strategy behind laying things in the order you need to max them out in this game is fun. But I *hate* that I'm told to go back and do it all again just because you want to force me to pad my time out content-wise by creating artificially scaled walls. I will continue to play this game, but honestly it's largely because it allows me to do so between calls from work easily. Without changes, it's just not respectful of time though, so I don't think it's worth it if you're coming into this expecting to be able to outsmart the rogueliteification. You won't. It's just a more fancy Tetris with a mini-game at the end. So yes, I do recommend this game... but at the same time, I don't.

Game has a great concept and wonderful art style but the execution is on par with an undergraduate CompSci project. A lot of the systems feel half complete and once you get over the 'Tetris with a new skin and a splash of strategy' its flaws become clear. Dangerously close to being a scam.

Warning, this is long winded, I have a lot of thoughts. But tl;dr: Can't recommend. Feels like they came up with a cool, eye-catching idea of "City Builder Tetris Roguelike" and then struggled to come up with ways to expand upon it in interesting directions. If you care to know why, allow me to explain: - Most keywords don't explain what they do. - Tons of achievements are just padding, "Get thing X times", ect, so you can earn unlocks. - Said unlocks are uninteresting. Some are cool, but many are just a single card, or feel like they were hacked out of the base game to become unlockables and pad playtime. - Navigation is pointless. At forks, your options all offer the same 'type' of encounter. Some options also just suck way more than others, so you aren't even making a choice there. - Enemy encounters use the same cards as the players. It means every normal fight plays out the same. - You always fight the same boss each act. This means some cards and strategies that get countered by a boss will always be bad. - YOUR TETRIS PIECES ARE INCONSISTENT. This means you can set up a 4-line "clear" only to have all your line pieces buried at the bottom of the "deck" of pieces. If they're even there at all. The level of randomness was also a real sticking point for my experience. I know the game is trying to make me not play "normal tetris" and encourage me to make tough decisions that interact with its mechanics... but... 1) that feels awful, because you're only punished. 2) they put in a "Reload Save" button in the menu that lets you RESTART ANY ENCOUNTER. Let me ask you this: If you can easily replay any fight that doesn't go well due to bad RNG... then what's the point of even having the randomness at all? To waste my time until I get a good run-out? To top it all off, the higher difficulties are just horrifically challenging. and the RNG of getting randomly hard-countered or bad piece order only makes it more annoying. And perhaps that would be fine, people like hard challenges after all. But right near the end of the unlock tree you get the third playable faction, "The Order", which revolve around not one, but TWO "Super-Resources" in Faith and Crusaders, which SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM. (Other factions can unlock Faith, but they can't access it nearly as freely as The Order. Crusaders are Order faction unique though.) The Order feels so overtuned that it feels like a lot of the high-tier difficulty is balanced around it. But a Faith & Crusaders build is so powerful that it's the only build to go for. Anything that isn't that can't really compete, which overall results in a late-game where you're going for the exact same choices and build every time while fighting an uphill battle of annoying RNG. In summary: An interesting concept held back by a ton of unfortunate design decisions. Maybe there's a fun game in there somewhere, because the first two hours are actually pretty nice, but beyond that my experience grew more and more aggravating every time I played.

Northernlion sucks at this game

love me a roguelike, love me a puzzle, 'ate unbeatable rng i played one run, got to the first boss, drew zero attack pieces and insta refunded the game is built around playing 80-90% of your deck. rounds end only after you play all but one tile or fill the board... the first boss i played against closed 2/3rds of the board, forcing the round to end much much quicker than normal in the short time i got to place pieces, I drew every single enemy piece and not one attack piece of my own. my deck had four attack pieces (literally everything i'd been able to buy before i met the boss) and i didn't draw any of them, so i lost. looks like a cool game with a cool design. I got rnGG'ed first time out. Gross. "rng is just part of these games" ok, fine, the player needs to be able to play with the rng then. Don't just hard fuck us.

My in-depth review. Great indie puzzle board game type game game.

Drop Duchy looks nice, but I can’t recommend it. The gameplay is heavily luck-based.

Wish I could do a meh - the auto-fall/fast drop mechanic was super frustrating and ruined several games. Great mechanic for real Tetris, not so great for this mash-up. Maybe an undo button would help. Refunded.

A great idea that is reasonably executed, ruined by its meta progression system in the following ways: 1) Rather than a generalized "experience" meter that increases after every run based on the success of the run, the game opts for a quest-based system. This encourages you to hunt for specific cards and exploit them to complete quests (at the expense of your runs), and provides absolutely no direct benefit for actually winning (outside of the first time, which completes a quest). Whether you die in Act 1 or on the final boss in Act 3, you do not gain any direct meta progression benefit unless you are completing quests. 2) The unlockable tree is huge but basically linear. No meaningful choices to be made, except for whether or not you want to interact with the system at all. Because: 3) Unlocking gameplay elements makes the game worse, not better. This is the central problem with the system. Given the sheer volume of things you unlock, the size of the item pool bloats extremely fast. Unlike Slay the Spire, where you will have multiple dozen opportunities to add cards to your deck during a run you're only going to get 4 or 5 chances per act in Drop Duchy. So unlocking things dramatically decreases your ability to get impactful or synergistic cards, meaning that the game is punishing you for interacting with the meta progression system. And the more that you interact with it, the more cards you unlock, so the more the game punishes you. Even before you're 10 hours in, the item pool becomes so large, and the opportunities to select cards so limited, that it all just feels like a slot machine. Meanwhile, what does a successful run even get me? Either nothing (because I didn't play the way the quests wanted me to play), or an even more bloated item pool. I had a great time for the first few hours, but I'm already at the, "Why am I playing this, again?" stage, and probably won't return to the game.

I found myself forcing myself to like this, but I can't. The game play is not addictive although it was fun for about 20 minutes. The concept is highly creative but in the year 2025, I can't justify the price for a game of Tetris. It is also not rewarding to complete runs as most roguelites with the strategy aspect being mostly what force has the larger number of troops. I often find my troop number to be significantly lower than the enemy, and it is not due to my playstyle, but in what tiles the game offers, without buffs or run modifiers. When you lose a game, the number of enemy troops subtract from your reserves (50 Reserves - 25 Enemy= 25 Reserves) and you are granted a win. I apparently won by scraping by with 3 reserves, and the game gave me achievements. I hated it because I didn't get any dopamine besides the Steam achievement sound. But when you win, your friendly number of troops does not add to your reserve capacity (50 Reserves + 20 Friendly = 50 Reserves). It doesn't even replenish a depleted reserve (3 Reserve + 20 Friendly = 3 Reserve). The only way you can replenish is by paying coin which is stupid because the game is very obviously favoring the computer, not the user. The tutorial also has way too much reading like this stupid review. Summary; The game should be $5-$7 of a working man's money.

It is a decent game with extremely poor game design and systems. No mouse controls means that you have to learn key bindings and cannot play with mouse. Those same key bindings cannot be displayed on the play screen meaning that you have to pause, look at a sub menu, pause again. It is very bad game design. Locking cards behind achievements feels really terrible to play. It like the worst F2P model. Most of the time you end starting a game and playing just for some silly quest that means you cannot even fight against the first area boss. Locked progression feels really bad to play. Getting new terrain while unlocking cards just doesn't feel good as a player. Having the same three bosses for the areas every single game gets boring and repetitive very quickly. Most of the cards are very confusing and hard to understand as a player especially as you unlock more cards because the enemy gets more cards as you the player does. I find it really bad that you can only play around 15% of a game when you buy it and have to finish arbitriary quests to even experience the majority of the game. Basicly this is bad game design by making the game feel more expansive by locking content behind achievements (aka quests). Again, this has all the scumbag moves of a F2P game but requires you to do a bunch of busy works tasks to enjoy the game instead of spending extra money. Overall a very poor player experience.

I feel a little pained giving this game a negative review because conceptually it's a neat idea. It's a deckbuilder mashed up with Tetris: you collect a deck of buildings and can deploy up to 8 per level, which line up and fall Tetris-like alongside a number of terrain tiles, and some enemy buildings. Your buildings either generate resources or provide troops. How the buildings align with the terrain and other buildings determines how effective they are. At the end of each level, your troops fight the enemy troops. Your resources are used to upgrade your buildings and generally develop between battles. There is also a research component - you can research new buildings, technology cards that upgrade your abilities and more. So, where does it go wrong? A deckbuilder works because you can control your deck to create synergies, and deal with and adapt to what the game throws at you. The problem is that in this game the randomness is so high - what cards you get, plus the Tetris game. It fails on the side of making you too vulnerable to RNG. Ironically, it works better at the start than later on: as you research more cards there are too many options and the deckbuilding becomes more chaotic. At this point, you end up struggling just because it's too much luck rather than judgement whether you can make your deck work. It's a critical flaw for this sort of game.

mobile game with pc game pricetag

cool concept but not really funny

Carcassonne and Tetris made sweet love one night, and 9 months later, this game was born.

Wait. Has a bug that makes A and W not work.

I don't like deckbuilders, i hate roguelikes, and i am not a fan of tetris, but this game is awesome

Tetris meets Carcassonne in the form of a delightful little rogue-like/deck builder game. Very simple at first glance, but the interactions get more and more complicated leading to new challenges and strategies.

Simply not Fun.

Very cool. Hurts my brain.