While It's Unclear How Many Dudes It'd Take To Beat Up A Gorilla, I

How Many Dudes? is shaping up to be a silly autobattling time.

There's been a question that has plagued mankind since the dawn of time—or, well, at least the section of mankind that has been in rough adjacency to gorillas. Given an unlimited supply of people, how many dudes would you have to throw at the gorilla before it went down? 50? 100? Would the dudes and the gorillas be better served by turning against the masters that placed them in this arena in the first place?

Those are some of the thoughts propelling How Many Dudes? a so-called "dudebuilder" roguelike where you amass an army of guys to pummel animals of varying quantities and sizes (and occasionally toddlers, I don't like to think about the toddlers). Really though, it's an auto-battler, and it's honestly a solid bit of fun.

Here's how it works: At the end of each round, you get to either post a flyer to start recruiting a certain dude type (thus defining your build), recruit a dude, or get one of three relics. If you've played any roguelike ever, you get how the relics work—they're stacking buffs that you need to synergise with your build, yadda yadda.

The real tug of war is in the knockout system. If any of your dudes get knocked out, you need to revive them with dude juice—stop giggling—a consumable you can buy at any shop. This dude juice revives 10 dudes per pop, and while you can game more by restocking the shop with its dude juice supply, you generally don't want to fall behind on your dudeconomy—economy, sorry. The dude is infesting me. Anyway, you can also wait a few rounds for them to revive, but I've got several horse-sized ducks to pummel.

Tempting you are the battles themselves, which at present give you a choice between an easy battle for less money, or a harder battle for more money. And thanks to the game's premise, there's actually a bit of variety in which you choose beyond confidence in how many dudes are knocked out.

For example, if you've got a dude build that focuses on cleave, you might want to start leaning towards battles where you're, say, fighting 287 bees. Or 400 toddlers. The dude war has claimed so many innocent lives. Meanwhile, if your bro squadron's got a lot of heavy hitters, bossfights might be more up your alley.

There's a satisfying chunk of complexity here to chew on already. In the two runs I played, I went for a defensive build—paladins, clerics, and ninjas who could turn invisible—and a more offensive build, stacked up with frankendudes who got an

Source: PC Gamer