Dominocalypse clearly takes some inspiration from Balatro and many other score-chasing roguelikes, but the dominoes spin is pretty darn clever. Disclosure: a key was sent to our Steam Curator.
Know nothing about playing dominoes? No problem, neither do i! You don't need to know anything. The dominoes are just an interesting way to represent tile-based scores in this one.
The setup here is that you're given a board with a few already placed dominoes, and a score you have to hit each round to be able to proceed. You score by placing down and matching new dominoes but it's what it does with this that makes it quite the challenging gem.
You get a fair amount of tile modifiers already on the board that will allow you to change how the dominoes act, along with your own tile mods to change the behaviour of dominoes you place down even more, which can match them up with tile modifiers. Some of them are quite simple, to give an example - like a movement mod. Place it down and match it up, and one tile from a domino will slide over. There's another that will send off a single tile from your domino like a rocket until it hits something. Incredibly useful when you want to build up a matching combo, or grab a special item from the board.
On top of all that you also get artifacts, which give you special boosts to really mess with the scoring system.
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Dominocalypse is a game all about maximising combination moves and chains. Simply placing down tile after tile doing basic matching will take forever, and likely lead to failure. If you run out of dominoes to place - it will be game over because there's no other way to score. You need to make great use of those modifiers, mods and artifacts to build up a huge combo to power through and watch the numbers constantly tick up. When you do manage to land a good one, it's very satisfying to see.
While there is a basic tutorial, which is just good enough to get you going, it's another game that firmly rewards experimentation to see how things chain together because there's lots of ways all the modifiers, mods and items on the board all work together - it's up to us to figure it all out to beat the game.
Tested on Fedora KDE 44 with the Native Linux version built with Godot Engine, and it works great. Fun to see what other types of board / tile games can be turned into score-chasing roguelikes.
If you enjoy a mixture of puzzles, strategy and game-breaking combinations it's another good one to check out. It's certainly not easy though, and you may need a bit of mathematical brain-power at your disposal to plan your moves carefully to be able to hit the score. It's all completely logical though, it's a simple numbers game where you power things up repeatedly. Easier said than done though - you'll likely fail quite a lot at the start like I did.
Easy to lose hours of you time in Dominocalypse.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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