JAIL DICE: Roll to Break

i almost never write reviews but i feel i have to make an exception for this awesome game that seems to have gone almost entirely under the radar! an arcade romp where you roll a giant 6-sided die around levels and use the 1 side to blast and its entire weight to crush enemy blocks that spawn all around you. it sits somewhere in between a puzzler and an action game, extremely original. the whole vibe is very PS2-esque, feels a creative idea executed by a few highly skilled people. a good time! okay, going back in...

Jail Dice: Roll To Break is an easy to pick up, hard to master puzzle game where you literally roll a die (itself operated by a busty anime babe) to collect jewels in order to escape a series of levels. Your main abilities are to roll and shoot, complicated by the fact that you can only shoot from the “1” side of the dice, making positioning is key. The main obstacle are enemies that can shoot back, inflict status effects on your die or simply block your die from moving, and you die when either you lose all your life or the level your own becomes too saturated with enemies. Fortunately, enemies will activate based on the number of times you shoot or move and you can see where they’ll spawn. The penalty for losing is fairly generous - losing once puts in a critical state and losing in that state essentially knocks you down down an upgrade tier, but you get to keep the points used to upgrade your die. What this boils down is that you’ll inevitably win more than lose if you pay attention, which becomes easier as the difficulty curve is a hill rather than a straight line. Despite the simplicity of the mechanics involved, the game suffers from two issues: enemies can spawn ju…

This game definitely deserves way more than the reviews that it is sitting at currently. Really solid and gameplay that requires some thought but definitely gets to feel frantic the longer you stay on a stage for points. My only complaint is going to echo those about the controller issues, it can definitely lead to some really bad feeling moments when you go a completely different direction than intended. However, for the price as well as the quality of the game this deserves way more love than it currently has. It's less than most fast food meals these days so please give the demo a chance and pick it up if it piques your interest!

This is a really wonderful arcade-style action game. It feels like finding a forgotten PS1 game - part of that might be the surface similarity to Intelligent Qube, but really it's the game's dedication to its thoroughly weird premise combined with original but accessible gameplay. This game is almost strictly a thinky roguelike on a small grid, but there are some action components. There are a lot of enemy attacks that you can avoid by moving at the right time. But even so, it's usually to your advantage to slow down, read the field, and plot your next move carefully. There are a lot of rough edges, but the core gameplay is fun and encourages you to play one more round. On the deck I have a number of crashes when transitioning menus. I never lost data and it never happened in the middle of a round, so it was more annoying than a problem, but it would be a problem for the one life mode unlocked after beating the boss.

I want to love this, because it seems like exactly my jam, but the long, unskippable (and repeating) tutorial videos drive me insane, and the controls. The controls require diagonal inputs, not up/down/left/right, like I've come to expect from 40+ years of isometric games. And if you try, or accidentally press UDLR, you get a random direction based on whatever direction you were moving last. It is basically unplayable with a controller. I look forward to coming back to the game if this is updated. In the meantime, a positive review because it deserves it for so many other reasons - the graphics, the vibe, the concept.

Good game