Dealer’s Life Legend [Review][Early Access]
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co
I’ve known about Abyte Entertainment’s Dealer’s Life games for years, even if I’d never played one until just before this review. The series started, fittingly enough, with Dealer’s Life, and was successful enough that there was a Dealer’s Life 2. These games took place in a pawn shop where players negotiate with randomly generated customers over randomly generated items. The idea is to buy low, sell high, and make a profit, allowing players to expand their shop. For their third game, Dealer’s Life Legend, Abyte took the formula and applied it to a fantasy setting. Now players travel from town to town to sell their wares, a meaningful evolution to the formula that keeps the series’ key concepts intact.
Dealer’s Life Legend opens up with a cutscene detailing a story that’s rather thin. The only thing about it that matters is that your character needs to travel to the capital city in a set amount of time and make as much money as they can along the way.
The game then opens on the first city, which the player navigates and interacts with through a series of menus. The cities in this game, like most things, are randomly generated. There are a few standard locations in each city, like a tavern or carpenter, but most of the buildings are randomly chosen from a pool. These include things such as an apothecary which sells potions, or an auction house that allows customers to bid on rare items. The main area of interest, though, is the market square where the player sets up shop and the merchant magic happens.
Cutting deals with customers and haggling to maximize profit is where most of the player’s time is spent. The actual gameplay seems simple at first – you and the customer go back and forth suggesting prices until you agree on how much an item costs. The moving pieces of these arrangements are surprisingly deep, however, and learning the ins and outs took me a couple hours.
Much like the city layouts, all the customers are randomly generated, from their appearance to their name to their stat blocks. There are four stats represented by a range on a dial. For example, the range might suggest a character is not greedy, very greedy, or nicely in the middle. Furthermore, how much of a client’s stats can be viewed depended on the intelligence stat of the character. This was unfortunately rather confusing and I found it best ignored.
The best way to negotiate seemed to be to find out how much an item was worth, lowball the seller without being insulting, and then upcharge the item to buyers. It seemed especially important early on to make fair deals to score points in the prestige stat. The higher the stat, the more the customer views you as a trustworthy merchant. Leveling this up grants access to higher level items, which tend to make more money than the lower quality junk you start out needing to swindle characters into buying. There are a lot of different stat blocks to manage, and at first they are overwhelming, but with some trial and error and a painful couple hours, I started to have real fun with this.
And that’s the thing. All the moving parts make up a gameplay loop that I found fast-paced and addictive. There’s just something about that drop of joy I felt when I pulled off a good deal and brought home tons of money. Simply put, it’s a lot of fun. This core gameplay loop is what will make or break the game for players. If you are someone who needs a lot of variety in their gameplay this game will not be for you. If you are someone (like me) who enjoys doing the same thing over and over without a lot of variety, this game is a chill cozy experience
On a final note I’d like to touch on the graphic design and music. The sound direction is awful. There’s just no way around it. I found it best to completely turn it off and provide my own background noise. I did like the visuals, though. Dealer’s Life Legend has an unique art style that gives the world a fun amount of whimsy. While there’s no narrative depth or memorable characters, the game’s look provided a lot of the flavor of the fantasy world. In particular, I really liked the character creator that allowed me to make my own character from various fantasy races including sheep people and pig people. Given the game is in early access, I hope more will be added to the character creator in additional updates.
Dealer’s Life Legend is still in early access with more updates and content planned. While I am excited to see what the game adds in the future, I’m hesitant to give it a score given its incomplete state. I think what’s here already is worth the purchase price, but I’m going to hold off giving the game a score until it’s complete. The game is currently on sale on Steam for $17.99.
