Roguelites are everywhere right now. But if there was a giant list of every genre that could be a roguelite, turn-based strategy games would be near the bottom of it. As much as I love them, they are surely too slow to be repeating over and over again, run by run.
Shows what I know. This year alone I’ve played three of them, and I’m sure there are others. I’ve chopped through triffids in the charming Oaken, and donned a loincloth in Dark Quest 3. But what’s even more surprising is that they’ve been good: they’ve acknowledged the tension between being a roguelite and having to play the same maps repeatedly as an X-Com. They’ve been swift and varied, addressing the problem at its heart.
Which brings me to Days of Doom – my third roguelite turn-based strategy game of the year. What sets it apart from Oaken and Dark Quest 3 is that it doesn’t avoid the potential pitfalls of blending these two genres together. It trips and falls into almost all of them. It made us appreciate Oaken and Dark Quest 3 all the more.
We’ve certainly got no fight with the artists and UI designers who made Days of Doom. This is a really rather stylish game, taking its lead from comic books. We could imagine Skybound waltzing into the offices at Sneakybox and offering hard cash to make it into a Walking Dead comics tie-in. The characters are well designed and the artists give into flights of fancy, making the enemies and characters into zombies with KISS makeup and hulking valkyries. The UI in particular is fab, with a game map that looks like it’s been unfurled onto an actual table. This is gorgeous stuff.
The theming is a little generic, being a – yawn – apocalyptic world riddled with zombies, but there’s enough Mad Max and Zombieland stirred in to inflict it with a touch of punk and humour. You are survivors who are looking to travel to civilisation, and the road trip takes you through suburbs, desert-like dry reaches, and the outskirts of a city. This is the roguelite: you are seeing how far you can get without becoming a zombie yourself.
Which means plotting a path between nodes, and those nodes mean different things. Most commonly it’s encounters with zombies, but you might find yourself completing events (which often lead to encounters with zombies), resting at a camp or purchasing goods at a market vendor. The more nodes you visit, the more fuel you expend, so balancing an efficient path with one that generates you resources and XP is your best bet.
Fighting zombies is the meat and potatoes of Days of Doom. Each map is a large grid, and you choose your placement on the left hand side of it. Then it’s turn-order time, as each unit has a speed stat that determines which goes first. Each friendly unit has two actions, and those actions can be used for movement (spend two actions on movement if you want, but be aware that you’re leaving yourself open to attack), an item consumable, or an attack. There are attacks that have a cooldown, and attacks that can be used with abandon, so you have to balance them accordingly.
There are enemies, too, of course, and they will use their actions in much the same way. Your tactics will involve staying out of their range so that you can be the first to engage. When you do engage, you’re going to want to wipe them out in one go, so they don’t get to nibble you at all. Health is persistent between battles, so conserving what health you have is a pretty darn good idea.
Victories give you resources like food, fuel and cash, while XP slowly makes your characters bigger and better war machines. But as good as they might get, they will die, and then it’s back to the start with the one retained resource – your money. With it, you can buy upgrades to your camp, adding more runes to your characters (the gold standard of upgrade) or increasing your earning potential within a run.
So, why doesn’t it truly work? It’s a long list, I’m afraid, so there’s no single solution that Atari and SneakyBox could resolve. The biggest is the one noted at the start of the review: a roguelite needs to be satisfying to replay, because an awful lot of replaying will be going on.
Days of Doom just isn’t satisfying to play more than four or five times. Battles are reasonably long and slow, as you would expect from a turn-based game, but Oaken and Dark Quest understood the problem and made their match-ups swift. Days of Doom’s battles are reasonably protracted, with the same enemies every time. You better enjoy fighting generic zombies, because they’re pretty much the only enemy you see in the Haven and Suburbs regions which open the game and you will play on every single run.
Variety within the characters would have helped. But there are solely four to choose from at the start of the game (you can start with three as default), and those four characters have locked-in abilities. Those abilities don’t get switched out or upgraded, so you playing the matches in much the same way every time. Levels, too, are the same square grid throughout, with only procedurally placed explosive barrels and barricades really changing things up.
Upgrades, too, are reasonably limp. You gain runes, which can be socketed into the characters as they go. But all they do is increase or reduce your already existing stats. They don’t change your character meaningfully: you just hit more or less. Completing a run is equally meh. We often returned to the camp after an hour’s worth of battling with enough cash to buy, well, nothing. We wondered if we played poorly, that we should have come back with more in a given run, but even a truly epic achievement only nets enough money to buy a fuel increase.
Characters unlock at a measly rate, too. We got excited when we saved a few on the road trip via events. Suddenly we had a Colossus and Pyro to play with. But on return to camp it’s clear that they’re temporary. The only way to unlock them permanently is to commit to a grind, and we already had plenty of that, thank you very much. We’d been tempted with some fantastic new characters and abilities, only to have it ripped away from us. The overall effect was to push us away from playing again.
We’re being a little unkind as there are still some turn-based joys to be found amongst the repetition. Characters, when you have them, are genuinely distinctive, and it’s a plum decision about which to bring. We’re a fan of protecting the Pyro with a shield and then plunging them into battle, flamethrowing everything that they can possibly see. And the later levels are so, so much better than the earlier ones, as they make better use of the space, make creative use of abilities, and even turn your characters into enemies. But Sweet Daryl Dixon do you have to trudge through a whole lot of mire to get to them.
There’s a long list of things that Days of Doom needed to be a successful roguelite tactics game. It needed to be quicker, more varied, less grindy and give you more options in a given battle. One of them would be a problem, but four is fatal. It’s not a bad game by any means, and it’s certainly a pretty one, but we’ve played three similar games this year – Oaken and Dark Quest 3 being the others – and we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them over Days of Doom.
