Dice Legacy Corrupted Fates: An ambitious but frustrating game

Dice Legacy is a game that piqued my interest right away, especially given my addiction to Civilization 6. So how does this really awesome idea go? Well, that’s complicated as this game is a bit peculiar and something a little different than anything I’ve played.

As a disclaimer, I will mention I played probably 20-30 games and never won, so I found this difficult. But I also feel difficulty is variable from player to player. Since I’m a new player I’m going to talk about my overall thoughts of the game and finish with my thoughts of the DLC.

Let’s open with the most basic of things. The game looks really great. The cutscenes, art and even sound production is great. The art style is almost that old Disney mix between realistic looking buildings, structures and people with cartoon art. The music is peaceful and relaxing but will get tense when the winter hits or you’re under attack. The dice art looks cool and is easily separated, which is really nice considering every class does it’s own thing.

The gameplay for Dice Legacy is fun but has a very steep learning curve. The basic loop takes peasant dice to do your starting work. These need to be on the right roll to gather, fight, build, etc. You take these dice and can upgrade them to a different class such as soldier, merchant, or citizen, each with their own abilities. As you roll each die they lose stamina. In the Switch version you have to roll them as a group unless you lock in what you need.

The winter adds temporary difficulty because you either need to constantly burn wood to keep your dice warm, give up on all projects or risk freezing your dice until summer hits.

There are perks to assist with dice or resource bonuses but nothing that changes the game. You can only have 12 dice at time, that have to hold all of your classes and what all you need them to be doing. Fortunately, there are tutorials that are deep and nuanced although they interrupt gameplay to show them, so you’ll never feel too lost more just trying to figure out how you need to run, what order to build in and what classes you need.

The most frustrating thing about this game is that I was playing it on the Switch. This is one of those games that is really hard to optimize for a controller. I was hitting ZR/ZL to navigate the landscape over and over to place my die where I needed them to go to get the job done. I imagine this is done much more simply on a mouse. There is a pause and fast forward feature as well which is nice if you need to lock a lot of dice in before a roll or all your dice are frozen and you just want winter to end.

The corruption DLC seems to add a huge new level of depth with the cultists that make policies that are a little darker, and even more technological. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see a lot of these things as my runs were usually cut short before I could see too too much as I was still trying to learn the basics and see everything the game had to offer.

Dice legacy is a ton of fun, but is very deep and requires a lot of time to learning its intricacies. A lot of my frustrations with this game came from using a controller and fighting to learn to optimize those controls while learning a survival strategy game.