MeinMMO author Ody has explored in a new demo on Steam the question of how many dudes it takes to defeat a gorilla. Just 20 minutes and hordes of bloodthirsty toddlers later, he knows: 33 dudes are enough, and he definitely wants more of this crazy game.
When I looked for new releases on Steam this morning that I could present to you here, I thought about a lot of things. However, a roguelike autobattler where I box hordes of toddlers or horses the size of ducks with an army of dudes wasn’t on my bingo card.
“How Many Dudes?” is exactly that – and much funnier than one might expect. In the new game by developer Butterscotch Shenanigans, the name says it all, as the only important question is: How many dudes do I need to defeat xy? If you want to get a feel for the game yourself, you can easily download the free demo of How Many Dudes? on Steam.
Here you can see a trailer for the game:
Many different dudes, one goal
At the beginning, the answer to this question is still quite simple: Just one regular dude is enough to defeat 10 bloodthirsty toddlers. However, with each round, the opponents become more dangerous and more numerous. Eventually, you’ll need a whole army.
After the first round, I was also able to choose between two classes of dudes to help me in future battles. I had the choice between a samurai dude who finishes off injured enemies with his katana or a “Fireball Casting” spell dude (you can probably guess what he does).
Being the absolute weeb that I am, I, of course, chose the samurai. And since I’m putting up an advertisement here, I get reinforcements from new dudes of this class between the rounds.
Later, I expanded my crew with some additional types of dudes:
- Knight dudes draw the attention of opponents and tank hits for their weaker dudes
- Cleric dudes heal injured dudes, prioritizing the ones who are most critically injured
- Bard dudes inspire up to 4 random dudes with their songs, making them faster and dealing more damage
And those are by no means all the classes included in the demo.
More than just a funny meme
Over time, I built a small army of dudes with which I can face every imaginable meme scenario: 33 dudes were enough for me to defeat a gorilla and 14 goats (but you might manage with fewer).
Your dudes fight on their own, by the way – and these fights are quite brutal. So brace yourself for bloodstains in the arena and exploding ducks. Even if you can’t control your dudes directly, you can support them with items. These allow you to launch meteors into the arena, summon lightning, or teleport your fighters to any place in the arena.
If this hasn’t been clear yet – yes, How Many Dudes? is an absolute meme game. If you can’t handle absurd “How many people does it take to defeat xy?” scenarios, the humor of the game might be too much for you.
The game, however, doesn’t just rely on the absurd humor of these memes to entertain. It’s also really not a bad roguelike. There are items that you collect, which give your dudes buffs. Even the exact arrangement of your dudes can have tactical advantages. For example, I collected an item that gives my dudes significantly more health points at the end of the formation. This is especially valuable for placing my knight dudes there since they need to take a lot of damage.
For me, How Many Dudes? could become a very similar experience to Brotato – a game I can spend many hours on while I’m busy with other things. I, for one, will continue playing the demo for a while.
But now it’s your turn. What do you think of the game? Funny or just plain ridiculous? Feel free to let us know in the comments. And since MeinMMO author Ody has already compared the game to Brotato, here’s a recommendation for it: I spent over 150 hours potatoing through endless alien hordes on Steam, and with 96% happy players, I’m not alone
