There’s been a question that has plagued mankind since the dawn of time—or, well, at least the section of mankind that has been in rough adjacency to gorillas. Given an unlimited supply of people, how many dudes would you have to throw at the gorilla before it went down? 50? 100? Would the dudes and the gorillas be better served by turning against the masters that placed them in this arena in the first place?
Those are some of the thoughts propelling How Many Dudes? a so-called “dudebuilder” roguelike where you amass an army of guys to pummel animals of varying quantities and sizes (and occasionally toddlers, I don’t like to think about the toddlers). Really though, it’s an auto-battler, and it’s honestly a solid bit of fun.
Here’s how it works: At the end of each round, you get to either post a flyer to start recruiting a certain dude type (thus defining your build), recruit a dude, or get one of three relics. If you’ve played any roguelike ever, you get how the relics work—they’re stacking buffs that you need to synergise with your build, yadda yadda.
The real tug of war is in the knockout system. If any of your dudes get knocked out, you need to revive them with dude juice—stop giggling—a consumable you can buy at any shop. This dude juice revives 10 dudes per pop, and while you can game more by restocking the shop with its dude juice supply, you generally don’t want to fall behind on your dudeconomy—economy, sorry. The dude is infesting me. Anyway, you can also wait a few rounds for them to revive, but I’ve got several horse-sized ducks to pummel.
There’s a satisfying chunk of complexity here to chew on already. In the two runs I played, I went for a defensive build—paladins, clerics, and ninjas who could turn invisible—and a more offensive build, stacked up with frankendudes who got angrier the more dudes had fallen.
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I then promptly put a relic that made my squad of regular, un-statted, low HP dudes taunt the 20 mallards or whatever I was fighting so that they would die immediately and give my frankendudes a buff. Turns out, Victor Frankenstein wasn’t the monster at all, it was me, the person who sent five regular guys into the blender to die for my sweet, sweet buffs.
For a game that’s still in its unreleased “there’s a demo you can play right now” phase, How Many Dudes? is a right laugh and just the right amount of roguelike moreish. The only real complaint I have is in the overall structure—see, unlike something like Slay the Spire, you can’t choose your path in How Many Dudes?
This leads to a lot of rounds where your fate seems basically random. Which, to be fair, might just be a taste thing: Autobattlers are like this. At the very least there are consumable items, like a meteor or bottled lightning, to keep things interesting. However, I quickly found myself mostly going through the motions, setting up a squad and then seeing if they would win or fail without much input.
Call me pretentious or whatever, but I generally like stupid choices I make in the moment to impact whether I die in a roguelike, rather than stupid choices I made 20 rounds ago, because I hadn’t adequately prepared for the configuration of one wolf and thirty smaller wolves. Still, if you like roguelikes, How Many Dudes? is literally free in a limited form right now, so it’s worth a look, dude.
