Diplomacy Is Not An Option's castle-building demo strategy is coming out with version 1.0 on October 4

We haven’t written about Diplomacy Is Not An Option since it launched in Early Access in 2022, a light and frothy strategy game about blowing thousands of villagers to pieces with physics magic. It still is, but now it’s version 1.0, launching on October 4th.

Diplomacy Is Not An Option release date trailer. Watch on YouTube

Version 1.0 will include Diplomacy's full story campaign, featuring three factions, six possible endings, and over 25 missions. The developers estimate that a single playthrough will take around 30 hours.

In his Early Access review, Steve Hogarty compared Diplomacy Is Not An Option to one of those fake games you see advertised on Instagram, but it's real. The scale of the enemy armies, the godlike power to destroy them with divine beams and meteor strikes, and the general feeling that the game is more interested in dazzling spectacle than tactical city-building.

But what the game lacks in variety, it more than makes up for in its fine-tuned, scratch-the-box approach to challenging gameplay. The cartoonish low-polygon visuals and punchy sound effects make building your sprawling fortress an irresistible pleasure to be repeated again and again, like scratching an itch deep in your skull. Assigning a few cohorts of crossbowmen to your towers and watching them effortlessly dispatch an oncoming wave of angry villagers is a soothing, cool balm for the mind, like gently pushing a vacuum cleaner over a particularly dirty piece of carpet and hearing the crunch of debris flying up a pipe. Mmm.

Honestly it sounds good. It's been on my playlist ever since and I keep trying it now that it has more variety and polish.

If you don't want to wait, you can find DINAO on Steam and GOG.

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