An ambitious, if not flawed, genre mashup. This is a downvote that makes me sad because there is a ton of potential here, I just think they tried to do too much at once. There are only two levels in the base game. I heard the DLC adds another, but I do not plan to purchase that. I completed the first level while only tapping into a portion of what the game offers – I only used three of the five dice classes to win and only a handful of available buildings. I was excited to dive in more, but after seeing that the game expected me to play the same level repeatedly in a different way, I wasn’t excited about it, and this is coming from someone who loves roguelike games and has played many of them. What would have been better, I think, is to offer mechanics slowly to the player over time, perhaps adding new dice classes and buildings over a short campaign.

I love what they have tried to do here, and I hope to see more of it in the future, but I think there are many things to learn from Dice Legacy. The game gives you just about everything up front. You have access to all the buildings and dice classes straight away, and you only have to build them. There really are no unlocks or a sense of progression that you get in other games from the genre. There are different leaders, but they only start with different dice load-outs that you can get as any leader after spending a short time in the game. The result is that you sort of feel like you have everything available already, so after running through it one time, there is not much reason to return. I will say that the initial run was quite interesting, but it was only a few hours of gameplay.

Then there are the dice themselves, which by their very nature are random in their result. As you roll them, they get less and less durable, eventually breaking altogether if not rectified. This is a bittersweet mechanic because it adds both tension and frustration. Unfortunately, I felt as if there were too many occasions in which I was searching for specific faces, therefore rolling constantly, and my dice were becoming damaged quickly as a result. Those faces you end up not needing just have no use, particularly in the early phases of the game. What would be better here is to find a way to offer more player choice for those times when faces may not turn up well. The only solution need not be to simply roll again and again.

I applaud the developer for trying something different here. Still, I can’t recommend it unless on a deep sale and with a caveat that unless you are particularly tenacious, you may only play this for a few hours.