It’s easy to forget that roguelikes are supposed to be turn-based. Most of the ones we get these days are real-time, often with a touch of action, but it’s not like that before. It used to be that the world moved when you did, that’s how everything worked. This meant you could stop and think, which is a fascinating way to play an action game. Well, Demon Lord: Just A Block is turn-based (sort of), and that’s a joy too.
In this game, you simply take control of the head of a Demon Lord, who has become a head for reasons you will discover as you play. It’s not an ideal situation, but hey, you’re a Demon Lord, you can always jump in if necessary, and you will. You just move towards enemies to damage them, and they have to line up their attacks or throw bombs and stuff. It all starts with one-on-one moves, but you can break the rules a bit. If you do it correctly, you can move twice to parry enemies or dodge attacks, and some enemies end up respecting these rules as well.
Hell, when you unlock different weapons, they change all the things too. You get a lightning chidori that lets you zap enemies, a bow for shooting from a distance, and a fist that lets you hit twice per attack. You even get slower ones, like a giant piece of ham, which takes two turns to hit, but hits in a huge area. As each run goes on, you can augment your weapon with special effects, but you can also flesh out your passives to create a build.
You get different trees as you go, like summoning lightning, using shuriken, having lots of friends, or a tree that just makes you invincible. As it stands, the latter seems to be the strongest by far, and is probably the one to go for if you want to have a really good run. You can choose which ones you want by searching for specific part icons, and it’s good for getting those really broken versions.
This also looks like what the game wants. There is one that generates shurikens when you attack a certain number of times, you can just keep attacking a wall to create new ones, then enter the next boss fight with 300 shurikens and win. There’s a lot of cool things to do here, and the different builds and weapons help make each run significantly different, on top of having to try and track down all the secret bosses and more, to progress properly. Basically, it’s just a lot of fun!
