PARADICE Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Skip
A dice-racing Board Game ported from mobile to PC. The mobile UI came with it, and so did the energy systems, the loot b
I'm a dice goblin. I saw the art style, I saw the dice, I clicked play. That's on me. My verdict is Skip. Paradice is a dice-racing Board Game from Retrocat. You roll dice to move your characters around the track, attack other players, and the first team to get all of its characters across the finish line wins. Three maps in the demo, up to four players in a match. The part nobody tells you on the Steam page is that it is already on Android, and the PC version feels like it.
Paradice has the bones of a party game and one decent idea in the Link system, but the demo I played was a mobile shop wearing a PC skin everywhere else. The energy systems, the locked cards, the bot-only matchmaking, and the suspicious-looking rolls combined into something I did not want to come back to. The art is nice. The dice concept has potential. Just not here, and not yet. Skip.
Pros
- The art is the strongest thing about it, which is what got me to click in the first place
- The Link mechanic has a real idea inside it, a speed-for-survivability trade you can actually feel before the demo grinds you down
Cons
- The whole thing reads as a mobile game: energy, loot boxes, multiple currencies, store cooldowns, pay-after-defeat prompts
- Real-money purchases were switched off for the demo, so what you are playing is not the version they are actually planning to charge for
- Card unlocks are gated by an in-game currency I never earned enough of, leaving me with underwhelming starting cards across the entire session
- Multiplayer matchmaking dropped me into bot matches every time, which means I never actually tested the social pitch of the game
- Seven ones in nine rolls, then a crash. I do not know if that is RNG or rigged, but losing nine rolls in a row to ones is not the demo's best look
The mobile port problem
The moment I loaded in, it felt like a mobile game. Turns out that is because it is one. Paradice is already on Android, and the PC version is appalling. Energy systems. Loot boxes. UI that belongs on a phone. A good Board Game on a PC screen does not need any of that, and Paradice keeps all of it.
The shop screen gives it away. Multiple currencies side by side. Eleven-hour cooldowns on the character store. A pay-to-continue prompt when you lose a match. That is not a Strategy game. That is a free-to-play attention economy with a different camera angle.
The card system
There is a card system. You land on a pink tile and you play one of your cards. The standard cards do small things, like drop a hammer on an enemy character, or move your own character one tile forward. You unlock better cards with in-game currency. I never earned enough to try them, so I was stuck with the standard ones across the entire session, and they felt underwhelming.
Real-money purchases were switched off for the demo. That tells you everything you need to know about where the system is going once they are switched back on.
The Link mechanic
The Link mechanic is the most interesting thing in here. Two of your characters land on the same tile and they Link together. One roll moves both. That is a real speed boost. The risk is that a single well-timed attack takes the whole linked group out for four turns or more.
There is real Strategy in deciding when to Link and when to keep your characters apart. The problem is the bots already know the answer. I always Linked. The bots always Linked. I suspect there are only a handful of situations where not Linking makes sense, which makes it less of a decision and more of a default. A good mechanic loses its shape when there is only one right answer.
Where this leaves the demo
Paradice sells itself as a Multiplayer game. Every match in the demo was against bots. The matchmaking screen waits about five seconds for a real player, finds nothing, and drops you into a bot match anyway. So that is where the social pitch sits right now.
I started losing every game, so I started tracking my rolls. Seven ones, one three, and one five across nine rolls. I asked an AI whether that was statistically suspicious. It told me it was within normal variance. I still don't believe it. Then the game crashed. That was it.
The art is nice. The dice concept has potential on a phone. But it only scores 2.5 out of 5 on mobile because of performance issues, so it is not even good on the platform it was built for. A PC Board Game has to give you more reasons to come back than this gives you. There are no Steam reviews yet and no release date for the PC version. My verdict is Skip, or try it on mobile and go in with low expectations.
Game Info
- Developer
- Retrocat
- Publisher
- Retrocat
- Full release
- TBC
- Platform
- PC
- Multiplayer
- No
- Controller
- No
- Playtime
- 1h
Watch the video review: YouTube
Tags: Board Game, Strategy, Multiplayer, Casual, Indie, Cute, Co-op
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