Disciples: Domination Review

30 hours into my Disciples: Domination playthrough, protagonist Avyanna finally starts feeling like an effective summoner. Despite fully dedicating skill points to the art of necromancy, I’m only now reliably raising skeleton minions from corpses strewn around the arena.

I find some joy in watching a horde of brittle skeletons slowly chipping away at one of Domination’s few imposing bosses, but this dragon’s bloated health pool turns an encounter with a much-needed splash of mechanical diversity into a slog; and, by this point, more than a few of the turn-based battles I fought echoed a similar feeling, just minus the grandeur.

The second entry in the strategy RPG spin-off series picks up fifteen years after its predecessor, Liberation. Having freed Nevendaar, Avyanna becomes an increasingly absent queen who cannot bear the weight of her crown. With her grip loosening, she springs back into action as crises erupt across her increasingly unstable realm.

Disciples: Domination splits its gameplay between traversing five regions of Nevendaar in real-time and fairly traditional turn-based battles, adding some light city, inventory, and army management on the side. Emphasizing flexibility, it allows you to teleport to Avyanna’s sole city of Yllian at virtually any point, even when you’re deep within its bland, repetitive dungeons.

This ease of access and the fairly hands-off resource game – they’re generated passively by buildings you capture while exploring – rarely leaves you lacking units for your army. The process of actually recruiting and upgrading troops, however, is a bit of a hassle, since it constantly requires you to enter and exit several menus rather than offering a way of switching between them without backing out.

Managing your realm also involves dealing with grievances that appear passively, but which you also unlock by exploring or at key points during the main quest. As much as they attempt to flesh out the world and its inhabitants, they’re merely simple, straightforward narrative events you click through to secure reputation, resources, and sometimes units. Certain choices they offer come at a cost of resources or reputation, but I never spent too much time thinking about these trade-offs.

Since they’re the main avenue of getting in the graces of the five factions – each tier of reputation granting rewards like units and slight reductions in leadership cost, required to keep troops in your active army –, it’s all too easy to just pick the option yielding the maximum reputation or any resources you might lack.

With no time limit to resolving these issues and little impact on the broader playthrough, I often forgot about them until the main story sent me back to Avyanna’s throne room. Worse yet, past the first third of the game, I often saw the same grievances popping up.

Furthermore, the ease with which you access the city itself is welcome when you lose a few too many troops after a chain of battles, but it also robs Yllian of feeling like the capital of an empire, being reduced to a portable unit factory that you keep in your pocket.

Disciples: Domination’s dedication to flexibility is also reflected when exploring its regions. These medium-sized, aesthetically bland maps fail to impress upon you the particularities of the people inhabiting them. Fast-travel points thankfully alleviate some of the tedium of riding across them, as you can quickly teleport to already discovered locations.

While it’s hard to complain about finding extra resources after you’ve spent yours on a new set of units, exploration rarely feels like it’s worth the effort. Even if the equipment you find helps Avyanna and her companions keep up with the increasing challenge they face, the various weapons, armors, and accessories merely offer simple stat increases while bearing similar names and icons.

In the final stages of the campaign, the higher rarity items do get one active bonus – like raising a skeleton when you kill a foe or replenishing action points –, but even then, having to sift through five Delicate Rings and four Chainmails to check which stats suited my build the most didn’t exactly send me racing to open my inventory screen.

Although it is a boon, especially later on, the ability to retreat from most battles at will also harms immersion. When encountering patrolling enemies, using it once simply moves the patrol to a different place in view. Repeat the process a few more times, and an army that could easily squish yours is cast aside in an act that feels less like running from battle and more like bullying a game system to let you go on your merry way.

Disciples: Domination’s story is off to a decent start, but its writing constantly switches between being serious and campy, to the point where they frequently and quite awkwardly intrude upon each other.

Avyanna’s unconvincing vocal delivery is easily the most grating, immersion-breaking aspect, as she neither sounds nor acts like an absent queen attempting to redeem herself or use her authority to bring subjects back under her control.

Few conversations make you empathize with the characters you encounter, due to frequent forced attempts at humor or clumsily cutting others off to establish authority. Instead of a troubled, imperfect liberator who struggles to handle the power she claimed, Avyanna feels out of place in the dark fantasy world of Nevendaar, giving us one of the most unconvincing protagonists in recent memory.

The supporting cast of companions, although flawed, is more likable, sticking closely to defined archetypes such as a loyal dwarf bemoaning his people’s fate, a stoic elf who uses blood magic to talk to spirits, or a snarky necromancer.

I would be remiss not to mention a few side quests that don’t fall prey to these woes – like one helping a forgetful necromancer remember what happened to them, or another that gives you the option of being eaten by an undead monster.

Several instances of non-voiced text – particularly lore entries, descriptions of places or actions, and two romances with non-companion NPCs – also surprise by heavily contrasting the generally wobbly tone and lackluster quality of the writing.

Disciples: Domination has no shortage of turn-based battles and, as much as they, too, overstay their welcome well before the final chapter starts, they show promise early on, doing most of the heavy lifting.

Right away, you’re given access to units from all five factions – elves, sanctuary (humans), undead, demons, and the mountain clans (dwarves) – and you can mix and match them as you see fit, within Avyanna’s leadership value limit.

The three types of action points – blue for movement, orange for movement and using abilities, red for using abilities – are distributed differently across units and, since the enemy roster mostly involves these very same troops, it encourages you to try them all out and familiarize yourself with what they can do.

Helmer, the dwarven companion, can taunt foes in an area, and if you aim the ability at melee troops caught behind the enemy’s frontline, you could force them to waste a whole turn. Several units attack in a straight line, which may prompt you to set up your starting formation differently to minimize incoming damage.

Each faction has four tiers of troops, unlocked by building upgrades that become available past specific points in the main story. Although only the latter tiers dish out anything close to serious damage, mixing and matching new types of attacks while tinkering with synergizing passives is fun for a while, despite some rather underwhelming visual and sound effects, the latter noticeably lacking oomph and occasionally having a bit too much distortion.

Aside from your active troops, you also have a backline comprised of three units that passively trigger dedicated abilities as the battle unfolds. These range from various buffs to attacking enemies from afar or generating corpses from which you can raise minions, complementing different army setups.

My favorite was the Celestial Blade’s beam ability, which would hit another opponent if it killed its initial target. Chaining two or three kills with it always felt satisfying.

The combat arena layouts vary to some degree, some funneling troops through narrower zones due to blocked tiles. As battles unfold, runes appear on hexes, granting buffs and debuffs to anyone passing through, while combat events further attempt to shake up how encounters evolve.

One such event, rockfall, targets specific hexes, killing any units present on them when it triggers while also blocking future passage. The Idol of Mortis places a shrine that spawns enemy skeletons until it’s destroyed, greatly prolonging fights if not dealt with ASAP.

They’re neat additions, but most of the battles still felt rather formulaic after a while, having two frontlines clashing while ranged units dealt damage from afar, with few exciting things happening in between.

Certain abilities allow you to push and pull units around, which, when paired with collision damage, can see you dishing out a fair chunk of hurt to enemies that huddle together, but they only rarely made a big difference.

Less great is the inability to rotate the map during battles. Although not a major issue in most cases, it does mean that, on occasion, you have to deal with weird camera angles that require zooming in to accurately target enemies.

Similarly, moving units can feel clunky, as it’s a single-click move that uses one preset route for each hex. This is especially annoying when trying to get your casters close enough to target enemies with spells without moving too far.

Although Disciples: Domination’s battles feel varied as you discover different units, they are neither deep nor dynamic enough to stay fresh throughout 35+ hours of gameplay. Beyond chapter 3, I permanently kept the combat speed toggled to 250%.

This becomes particularly aggravating as enemies and bosses outleveled my army on quite a few occasions, which meant I had to spend a chunk of time completing rote side quests that involved at least one fight to comfortably overcome some foes without lowering the difficulty.

Performance

On an i7-13700K, 32 GB RAM, and Nvidia RTX 3080@1440p, Disciples: Domination ran smoothly. It’s not exactly a looker, but I did only have a single instance in which alt-tabbing turned my screen black, forcing me to manually restart my PC. I did encounter a few small bugs, like looping conversations, getting stuck in the grievances menu, and passing through a few interactable doors in dungeons that rendered me stranded until I reloaded an older save, but nothing persistently frustrating.