Dice ‘n Goblins Deep Look

Even with the late balance roadblock, there’s a good amount to like about Dice ‘n Goblins; the dungeon-crawling and combat are well executed and keep players engaged.

The debut title from Tsukumogami Software, Dice ‘n Goblins offers players a mixture of dungeon-crawling and turn-based combat that blends strategy and luck through its use of dice and skills. On the whole, it provides a largely fun experience with well-put together dungeons and a combat system that gives players plenty of ways to cater the dice to particular strategies. However, its later dungeons currently exhibit an intense difficulty leap that may be a step too far for some players.

The game puts players in the role of a young goblin who sets out to try and lead her people to safety, finding her way through a curious assortment of locales and taking on the threats within. Each interconnected level offers something different from the one before, seeing players explore multiple floors as they find the way to progress, whether it comes from finding switches, falling through the correct bit of missing floor, swimming, or launching between. The story and plot are largely inconsequential; it does the job of giving players the impetus on what to do next, but provides enough moments of levity and charm to add to the overall experience.

The game takes players across a variety of grid-based levels.

As players explore, the grid-based map will fill out automatically, which generally helps players keep track of where they’ve gone. It also lets them identify any untracked corners that may hide the route forwards or treasure coming in the form of money or new equipable items. It’s well worth exploring to find everything available and none of the game’s dungeons are especially onerous in terms of length, although it would be nice if the game was a bit clearer about the existence of walls and edges in certain maps. Each level contains a reasonable number of enemies — which will chase the player if spotted but not advance through any doors, stairs, etc. — as well as at least one boss fight, with a number of sub-bosses scattered around. The dungeon layout designs are strong, providing some enjoyable pathfinding puzzles and a good steady sense of progression through them.

Combat is one-on-one and turn-based, with the player’s dice throws fully visible on screen. Players can equip up to five pieces of equipment, which determine what dice they roll each turn. Dice are split into three main types: attack, defence, and healing, though there are alternate poison, pierce, and vampyr sub-types that complicate things a bit further. At the start of each turn, the relevant dice are rolled and provide the initial results for that turn. The player’s attack is reduced by the enemy’s defence to determine how much damage is dealt, and vice versa, while healing is applied before any damage is done. Vampyr steals health, but is reduced if the enemy has any defence left over after the attack calculation; the same calculation is done for poison, with its damage taking effect only on the next turn. Pierce always does that amount of damage, regardless of the opponent’s defence.

Combat is partly at the mercy of the dice, but players have options to re-roll or alter the results.

Strategy comes into play in multiple ways. In addition to determining the dice thrown, equipment also provides potential combos and effects should the activating numbers come up. These effects come as bonuses on top of the dice totals, either static numbers or extra dice, but are often powerful and can change the tide of battle. However, enemies will also have their combos that players will want to try and avoid. Obviously, it’s hard to do this when fully at the mercy of the dice throw, so Dice ‘n Goblins gives players a couple of ways to deal with this. First, players can use a star to re-roll any number of dice, up to twice per turn. Secondly, after choosing to re-roll or not, players can also use stars to activate equipped skills. These skills provide effects including turning one die into a different type and increasing or decreasing its value. Players regain one star per turn, provided they don’t use any re-rolls or skills that turn, so players do need to decide when it is worth using the stars, or they might not have any when needed later.

Victory in combat rewards players with experience and a small amount of money, which can be spent on a selection of additional equipment at a vendor that pops up occasionally. Levelling gives players a small amount of extra health and a skill point to spend unlocking extra skills, but otherwise attack and defence power are determined solely by the dice provided by equipment. Nonetheless, it offers a welcome sense of progression, and the combat proves to be a solid system that works in giving players the sense of danger and excitement of the roll of the dice, as well as plenty of strategic options. It would be nice if there was more variety to the enemies, as there is a limited selection within each level and they do get a bit rote towards their respective ends, but there’s still always that engagement of seeing how the dice land and reacting accordingly.

One of the biggest difficulties crafting any combat system is finding the right challenge balance. For most of the game, Dice ‘n Goblins walks the line nicely with its solitary difficulty. It gives players some bumps in the road, but ones that can be overcome by thinking strategically, planning, and adapting. However, in the review build, there is a point where the regular enemies suddenly become able to hit much harder than before and it’s very hard to overcome with the tools given to the player at that point. With enemies respawning after every defeat ( though all other progress remains intact upon defeat), and the particular dungeon’s design making it very hard to avoid them, the frustration reached a breaking point.

Equipment determines which dice players are rolling.

The audiovisual elements are largely effective, if unspectacular. The papercraft and crayon-style character art looks really nice and helps it fit in with tabletop-style, dice-rolling gameplay. Physics for the dice rolling is a bit mixed; it’s nice to see them in action, but sometimes the dice get a bit stuck and need a bit of prodding from the engine, and often they don’t really roll all very much at all. Meanwhile, the levels are strongly designed in terms of layout, but there’s not a huge amount of interesting things to see within them, as they largely fall into connected rooms and corridors. There’s at least decent variation between the separate levels to give a further visual sense of progression as players move from one to the next.

Even with the late balance roadblock, there’s a good amount to like about Dice ‘n Goblins; the dungeon-crawling and combat are well executed and keep players engaged. However, that balance issue feels like a problem that should be solvable with a post-launch update, so even those wary of the late challenge now will do well to keep the game on their radar, which otherwise deserves success.

Disclosure: This article is based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.