Worth the gamble
> Apple Arcade FROM Distractionware Limited
> NEEDS iPad/iOS13 or later
With games like Hades, Slay the Spire, and Exit the Gungeon, the iPad has become a surprisingly excellent little roguelike machine over the last few years. Despite launching way back in 2019, Dicey Dungeons+ has just come to Apple Arcade and it is already one of the very best games on there.
Set in a twisted game show, you play 6 different contestants, all of whom have been transformed into dice and must try and win back their freedom from Lady Luck, a devilish representation of the house. As you might be able to expect, the house always wins.
Each of the six dice have unique personalities, which allows them to take on different playstyles. In essence, it’s a card battler, where you create a loadout with equipment, then roll your dice each turn and play the appropriate moves with your hand. This means that you must stack your loadout in a way that accounts for the broadest range of potential dice rolls, and take the hit if you haven’t quite guessed right. It’s a game that’s reliant on not only the aesthetics, but also the rules of gambling, and is almost as compelling.
It looks great on the Liquid Retina Display of the iPad, paying particular note to vibrant colors and smooth animations. It sounds just as good, with a super catchy soundtrack courtesy of Chipzel. It all has this incredibly fast pace that is matched by the board. If you manage to take down your enemies with your dice rolls, you have to progress through floors to take on one central boss. Each floor consists of a handful of enemies, shops, items to heal, and some other random events. It’s simple conceptually, and you can pick up the flow of the game in just a single run. It’s deceivingly simple once you start to learn it, but gets more and more complicated as you think about each turn.
The fun of Dicey Dungeons+ comes from working out what makes each character tick, with the first dice being reliant on traditional rolls, the sec
