HomeReviewsDiplomacy Is Not An Option
Diplomacy Is Not An Option review (early access): peasant-smashing fun on a giant scaleResistance is feudal
Resistance is feudal
Diplomacy is Not an Option. Early Access gameplay teaserWatch on YouTube
Diplomacy is Not an Option. Early Access gameplay teaser
In the moments of respite between attacks you’ve got a precious handful of minutes to expand your town with more homes for settlers, more farmlands and fisheries for food, and resource-generating buildings like iron mines and lumber mills. As your storehouses fill up with stuff you can upgrade your structures from wood to stone and expand your growing army with better equipped units and weapons. You can build a hospital to prevent the corpses of fallen soldiers festering where they fell and causing a plague, and you can hire gravediggers to properly bury the dead so that they don’t reanimate as vengeful zombies.
Plonked at the centre of the map and initially exposed on all sides, your weedling town hall needs encircling with as many defensive towers, gates and crenellations as you can build before the next wave arrives. These waves come thick and fast, with increasingly aggressive enemy forces eventually numbering in the hundreds and thousands of units, until they’re flowing between buildings like meaty rivers and crashing up against your defensive line like, well, waves.
Diplomacy Is Not An Option is pretty much that mobile game constantly being advertised on Instagram, which you obviously don’t download because you’re certain it will turn out to be a Candycrush clone that will somehow steal your national insurance number to destabilise an election in Uruguay. It’s that mobile game, but as you first imagined it, right down to your ability to fire off godlike and visually spectacular magic spells: things like divine rays that scythe a path of devastation through an attacking army, and a meteor strike that sends soldiers flying skywards on a sub-orbital trajectory.
But what the game lacks in variation it makes up for in its finely tuned and scratchcard-like approach to compulsive play. The cartoonish low-poly visuals and punchy sound effects make building out your expanding fortress an irresistible pleasure to be repeated over and over again, like scratching an itch somewhere deep inside your own skull. Assigning a few cohorts of crossbowmen to your towers and watching them effortlessly obliterate an approach wave of angry peasants is soothing, a cool balm for the mind, like slowly pushing your hoover of an especially dirty bit of carpet and hearing the crackle of debris clattering up the tube. Mmm.
Of course if you’re less into gaming ASMR and more into actual strategy games – if you went on Mastermind and told John Humphrys that your specialist subject is strategy games and then you got 19 points in the first round and made John Humphrys say “Christ” under his breath – then you’ll bounce off Diplomacy Is Not An Option so hard it would make your teeth fall out. Right now the game is stripped right back to just a handful of unit types, some simplistic resource management and a research tree that peppers your soldiers and workers with light buffs, rather than anything so drastic as reshaping the game around your preferred playstyle.
Diplomacy Is Not An Option is a compelling little game with short-lived appeal for super serious strategy fans, but one with loads of character and entertaining physics. It’s a delightful merry-go-round of building stuff and defending stuff that sometimes handcuffs you to your merry-go-round horse and doesn’t let you off.
