Dice A Million

Dados molones

Really fun game with a lot of cool ideas :)

This would be a "mid" non-review if not for the relatively high asking price for what it offers (super-basic gameplay, no real graphics or notable assets to speak of, 2 minutes of gameplay stretched into hours by poor mechanics and even more poor RNG). The basic mechanics are relatively fun, easy to grasp, and are either explained or shown with little padding. However, there are significantly more "unknown" mechanics that seem to have no rules, can ruin a run for seemingly no reason, and just exist randomly 1% of the time. Normally this would be alright in a rougelike where you are there for the run and occasionally experience the fringe content, but the run is horrid in this game and the fringe content is too readily forced upon you that most of the time you cannot ignore it. Builds in this game are a joke. The RNG prevents you from even trying to put together a logical "deck", with RNG in whether you even get a reward, RNG on what type of reward, RNG on the rarity of the reward, RNG on the cost of the reward, RNG on the reward itself, RNG on the outcome of the reward (yes, even getting a reward guarantees nothing), and RNG if you have rolled the correct value to successfully get the reward. All of those have to align perfectly to even remotely achieve a "build" of any choice at all. Mostly, you are picking random rewards and praying for the best later on. The different starting hands are a decent idea, but poorly executed at best. Most want you to try and focus on one type of play, but (as seen before) trying to make any builds is impossible, so you restart a single hand dozens of times hoping to get lucky enough to get a few rolls in your favor and beat the first boss. But, then you are forced into a grueling process of trying to beat the other 2 bosses (there appears to be only 3 relevant fights in any run), and not getting at least 75% rewards in your favor ruins the run, where you have to retry with that hand or another. You don't feel like you did something wrong, or that you understand that hand better, you just realize more and more how much BS the gameplay loop is. The unlocks are another horrid example of how to not do a rougelike. It feels terrible to earn and unlock, or to win a die (99% of die suck regardless), because all you do is dilute an already ridiculously huge pool of options into an ocean of "frick it, RNG X 1000." There is no way to limit what drops you get, or how they may affect your deck. You just get 10X the number of BS, with half the number of usable rings/dice/cards/enchants/stamps being unfindable. Overall, fun for a single run or two when the game is more limited and the end is not "Try 10,000 times while unlocking various upgrades arbitrarily hidden behind WTF mechanics" while fighting everything you have "earned" before. At most this would be a decent purchase at 2 or 3 bucks for a few hours of fun.