Dice Gambit

Debut games are always a hard thing to nail. Some developers show promise while still having much to learn, while other developers make it harder for everyone by absolutely smashing it on their first try. It makes it hard for reviewers to really consider the expectations we can lay upon these developers, especially depending on how much support they’ve been given by a publisher. When I read that Dice Gambit was being created by a pretty tiny team, it made me lower my expectations, but I shouldn’t have worried.

Chromatic Ink has created a game that fits snugly among the competition in the turn-based strategy genre. It will definitely first draw your attention through its glorious visuals, with its city and characters being brought to life through vibrant colours, gorgeous hand-drawn art and lively action. Luckily, the game is far more than just eye candy: it’s backed up by an interesting story and some really good gameplay.

Let’s dive into the story first. You are the new Inquisitor, the heir to the role in a noble family. You return to the city where your family resides, a place that is ruled by a number of noble families, all striving to get the most control, whether through legal or rather less legal means. However, you’re not here to do battle with these families: you’re here to save the city from an invasion of chromatic monsters!

Fighting these monsters happens through turn-based combat, where everything gets decided by the dice you roll. Depending on your class and skill level, you’ll have a certain number of dice to spend each turn, which will have you moving about, setting up your defence, or attacking your enemies. It’s a fun new way of refreshing the genre, and it works really well, or at least it does in the first part of the game, but more on that later.

Returning from your travels to your mansion, you have a selection of things to do. You can check out your relationship levels with the powerful families in the city; you can heal up. There’s an academy where you can upgrade your character or reconfigure them to a different class altogether, but then there’s also the family stuff. Because taking on a whole army of monsters on your own might not be in your best interest, so you can call in reinforcements.

These come in the form of marriages, where your partner will be able to help you out in combat as a fully fledged character themselves, but there’s also an incubation chamber, which is dubious to say the least. Basically, it allows you to have children without the whole tiring childhood factored in. Your children immediately become adults and are able to join you on your adventures as well. They can also get married, have children of their own, etc., basically creating a whole new lineage for your family.

It’s a bit of a weird choice to have, especially as the relationship with your family members is non-existent. They are there to make up the numbers, to have characters in different classes with whom you can build devastating synergies. But you don’t interact with them whatsoever, which is a shame, especially since the interactions with other characters are some of the most interesting aspects of the game.

As I mentioned earlier, there are other powerful families in this city, and you will get to know some of their members through conversations and missions you complete for them. There are some choices to be made about which of them you want to keep closer and who you want to keep more at a distance. These choices will influence your game, and all of these people have their own effects and boons that you can use to level up. Now, I have to be honest and mention that the interactions you have with these characters are limited, as they are all confined to being archetypes of characters rather than fully fleshed-out people, but that’s a minor complaint from me.

Why? Because this game already holds so much more than I had expected from it. Dice Gambit is full of stats and options to manage, creating unique ways of playing that no one will experience twice. That means there’s a whole lot of replayability on offer, and the game isn’t that short to begin with either. It’s also very welcoming to newcomers, with difficulty settings allowing you to experience the game in any way you prefer.

Replayability does get hampered a little bit, though. From the second act on, the game doesn’t really seem to know how to increase the difficulty in the most interesting ways, with combat usually devolving into more enemies on screen to create more chaos. This isn’t bad per se, but with many of the combat scenarios requiring you to beat a certain boss character, it becomes easy to just focus on that one monster without needing to think of more interesting tactics to use.

It’s a shame, because aside from that, the combat really feels excellent. It’s an interesting vision of a genre that sometimes struggles to find new avenues to explore, and it can be enjoyed by both newcomers to the genre – with everything being explained in a good way – and people who have more experience with it. Hopefully, the developers will keep providing updates so the later levels can become that tad more interesting gameplay-wise, but even now, the story and gameplay are worth spending your time with.