Disciples: Domination Review – Dungeons And Dragging

Way back in the day, like a lot of kids, I got hooked on Heroes of Might & Magic. It was a strategy game with RPG elements, a well developed fantasy world, a vibrant color palette even for the villainous factions, and it was addictive as hell in that “one more turn” kind of way. Beyond the sequels, it naturally spawned imitators and competitors. One of these, Disciples: Sacred Lands, was an interesting spin on the formula with a somewhat darker aesthetic which called to mind the works of Yoshitaka Amano, particularly Vampire Hunter D. As the series progressed, it mutated away from the HoMM formula to find its own way. The latest entry, Disciples: Domination, doesn’t bear much resemblance to its progenitor, and that’s something of a problem.

Picking up where the previous entry, Disciples: Liberation, left off, Domination puts you in the role of Avyanna: liberator of Nevendaar, deicide, and possibly the worst Queen ever to ascend the throne. Did she start dressing in black, poisoning apples, and going “Muhahah!” every five minutes? Nope. She basically let her new kingdom fall apart for twenty years, five minutes after the crown went on her head, before finally deciding to get off her backside. And her timing is wildly convenient, since an old threat is starting to rear its ugly head once more. You must guide Avyanna across the breadth of Nevendaar, recruiting allies, building up all the relationships that have been neglected, and developing armies who can stop the return of a god long thought dead.

From a visual perspective, Domination has something of a consistency problem. The environments are generally well done, though a tad simplistic in spots. The UI functions well enough overall, but for some reason certain actions on the UI seem to fall out of your perceptive range now and again. Some character models seem to have textures on them which look really nice, and others which look muddled and blurry. When the camera is zoomed out for overland travel or exploration of dungeon zones, the animation of your avatar is generally smooth, but it doesn’t feel natural. There are a number of really nifty looking special effects for buffs and debuffs which spawn on the battlefield, as well as cool effects and animations for spells, but a lot of them don’t seem to modify the visuals of the characters or units that they’re modifying. One serious failing of the UI, I thought, was the way that certain locked chests were shown on the map (which requires you to recruit a specific companion later on in the campaign to open) but similar companion-specific hotspots weren’t marked on the map. It creates a lot of needless backtracking to find those points again. Overall, with regards to the visuals, one gets the impression of “not terrible, not great.”

A similar impression follows the sound elements of Domination. Sound effects are decently done, but the variety doesn’t quite seem to be there. Music plays in the background of exploration and combat, but it doesn’t feel particularly expressive. We don’t get a feeling of adventure in the overworld and we don’t get the bump in blood pressure when combat occurs. The voice acting isn’t terrible, but it’s not especially engaging, either. Characterization just doesn’t seem to occur organically, and the repeated mismatches between what’s being spoken and what’s presented on the screen take you out of the immersion pretty quickly. None of the audio elements are actively awful, but you get the feeling they could have been so much better.

Coming from the early iteration of the series, it was rather an adjustment in terms of gameplay with Domination in some respects. Not an impossible adjustment, really. Yet it seemed to have a great deal of friction to it, mechanics that needlessly slowed the pace in all the wrong ways. Your forces are bigger, there’s a great deal of weight put on position and status effects, and the presence of “back line” units helps develop good strategic combos to keep your forces on the move and the enemy on the back foot. At the same time, if you happen to develop a good force loadout, you find yourself deeply reluctant to change it. Worse, there’s not much of an incentive to change it. The XP gained from completing a battle is always the same amount, and it’s always small. You get a 50% bonus if there’s a secondary objective you successfully complete, but some of those objectives appear to be effectively impossible, which doesn’t motivate you to go out of your way for such a small payoff. In the same vein, there’s no incentive to try and take on enemies who are higher level than your current army because the XP payout is the same at the end of every battle. There may be different modifiers or hazards in each battle, but there’s no risk/reward loop to give you a reason to pick a fight with somebody tougher. Likewise, the “Conquer” mechanic seems to require you to be a significantly higher level than an opposing force, which calls into question the utility of having it if you’re unlikely to find yourself being strong enough to actually use it.

The RPG and kingdom development elements are both a little on the simplistic side. You, running the main character, have a number of different “paper doll” slots to fill out with all sorts of gear. Yet much like the army situation, once you’ve got a good gear loadout, there’s not a lot of motivation to try changing it up. Sure, you can improve your gear as time goes on and you have the resources to do it, but other than making the numbers go up, it doesn’t feel especially useful. As you progress through Domination‘s campaign, you’ll have the opportunity to improve your kingdom, upgrade buildings, get better units, that sort of thing.

The problem here is twofold. First, the opportunities for improving the castle (which allows for other buildings to be upgraded) appears to be heavily tied to advancement in the story. Without knowing what those narrative thresholds are, you’re basically waiting until you get the prompt to upgrade your castle. This kills a lot of the fun when you’ve got a Tier I unit trying to take out an enemy Tier IV unit. You’re paradoxically on the wrong end of the unit strength imbalance and yet you’re also kind of wrecking face to a point where you’re not really sure if it’s worth upgrading to those higher tier units when the time comes. Second, upgrades of every stripe cost money and materials. In the early game, you’re going to be gathering a lot of those materials simply by running around the map and progressing the story. You have the opportunity to claim resource nodes of different sorts, but they’re generally held by hostile forces, which means a lot of extraneous fighting. But once you’ve got the nodes, they’re pumping out materials at a constant rate. The kick in the teeth is that it requires a lot of materials to upgrade gear, units, and structures. And while the rates of production are expressed in units per hour, you’re pestered every half-hour to deal with various grievances your subjects are experiencing. Perversely, the best way to build up resources sufficiently is the same behavior which notionally caused the central problem of the narrative: you sit on your ass and do nothing for the realm, ignoring all the problems and hiding away at the kingdom screen while you just rake in the goods. It’s a strange bit of ludonarrative consistency which hinders your enjoyment.

I talked earlier about the characterization issues Domination showing up in their conversational sections. The actors and voice director bear some of the responsibility, but they can only work with what they’re given. And what they’ve been given isn’t great. The conversations are stilted and poorly written, veering between massive lore dumps and trite narrative conceits that have been done before and been done better. And adding insult to injury, the writing doesn’t seem to have undergone a lot of good QA work. On top of the vocal mismatches, I caught at least one atrocious word error which suggests some truly abysmal localization work. Look, I can’t realistically expect writing on par with Baldur’s Gate III all the time, but Domination is uncomfortably close to Dragon Age: Veilguard in terms of quality, albeit different in the presentation of its failings.

Way back when, the original Disciples was a worthy competitor to the classic Heroes of Might & Magic. It had an aesthetic, part art nouveau, part Gothic fairy tale, and everything fit together within that aesthetic from the gameplay to the music to the narrative. Disciples: Domination feels very much like a pretender, somewhere between cheap knockoff and fan fiction. It smacks of a series entry which was “improved” without considering what was worth keeping from the earlier entries. It fails to live up to its predecessors, it fails to realize its potential, and it fails to keep the player in the sort of “one more turn” (or its equivalent) which the original title pulled off so well. Fans from Disciples: Liberation will probably be curious to see how things progress, but this is not a great point to enter the series, and I’d hate to see it be how the series ends.

Axel reviewed Disciples: Domination on PlayStation 5 with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and will not be changed.