A whole new ballgame
Developer Ustwo Games
Publisher Ustwo Games, Netflix
Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch
Origin UK
Release TBA 2022
Your childhood art teacher – the one you always liked but suspected was disappointed in you, especially after she walked in on that impromptu life-drawing class – is aiming a rubber ball in your direction. As soon as she gets an opening, she’ll fling it and knock you out of the game. You haven’t got a ball, alas. But that friend from your clubbing days, the one who kept partying long after you lost the energy for it, who you worry might think you’re boring these days? He does. He passes the ball, and you ping it off a wall to strike your teacher on the back of the head. And then the two of you have an emotional breakthrough.
“We make the games that we want to make, basically,” game director and Ustwo chief creative officer Danny Gray says, explaining how the Monument Valley studio picks its next project. “We don’t look at what the market is doing and then try and build one of those. And equally, we don’t necessarily speak to a partner and ask, what’s missing from your portfolio?” It’s the kind of line we’ve heard from many developers over the years – but on the evidence of the game before us, we’re rather inclined to believe him. After all, it’s hard to imagine that when Netflix signed Ustwo’s latest for its growing mobile games initiative, the streaming giant was looking to fill some quota of turn-based tactics emotional dodgeball Roguelikes.
Despite the combination of ideas at work here, Desta is simple to play – after all, Ustwo has both its own audience and the one Netflix is targeting (“normal people”, as Gray puts it) to consider. “The objective for the game was, maybe we could get people who’ve never played a tactics game, never played a Roguelike game, to play one for the first time,” Gray says – anotion that makes it something of a relative to this issue’s cover game. Imagine a more approachable version of Into The Breach and you’re in the right ballpark. The scenarios are less punishing, there’s a minimum of onscreen UI to parse, and shots are aimed via a classically mobile pull-back action.
At times, particularly at the start of a run, when you’re fighting alone against one or two enemies, it can be a little too simple. Gray acknowledges that, for genre veterans, “you’re probably going to get more out of story than you are the depth of gameplay”. There are plans to bolster the difficulty for these players post-launch, with harder modes and releases of challenge packs that trade the procedural generation for t
