Devolver Digital's new roguelike All Army Attack gets a demo next week

Publisher Devolver Digital and developer BlackLight Games have announced All Army Attack, a large-scale roguelike auto-battler scheduled for a full PC release via Steam in 2027. A playable demo will run from November 16 to November 23 during the upcoming Steam Auto-Battler Fest.

The reveal is the punchline to a joke Devolver set up on November 9, when the Austin-based indie label told followers it was about to announce its first-ever "AAA" game. Rather than a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster, the acronym stands for All Army Attack. That tracks for the company behind Hotline Miami, Cult of the Lamb, and Inscryption, which has spent the years since its 2009 founding treating traditional industry hype as something to poke with a stick.

From tower defense to screen-filling mobs

All Army Attack puts you in the role of a commander uniting an assortment of armed farm animals and plants against an invading cosmic threat. It is a follow-up of sorts to BlackLight Games' previous release, the 2024 roguelike tower defense game Cluckmech Oasis, bringing back the studio's anthropomorphic animal cast and colorful 2D art style while trading defensive turret placement for offensive, screen-filling swarms.

Each run combines card-drafting mechanics with auto-battler combat. You recruit gun-toting chickens, heavy artillery, and mutated flora from randomized card pools that shift depending on which commander and map you pick. Every individual soldier and card can be modified, crafted, or mutated mid-run to string together synergies as your forces scale into the hundreds and spill toward the edges of the screen.

There's a gambling angle built into the combat loop, too. Commanders have to weigh high-risk skirmishes against tactical retreats, deciding when to sacrifice troops for maximum income and when to pull back so valuable units survive into the next round. Between runs, those earned resources feed into town-building systems, stat bonuses, unit upgrades, and character hats. Putting hats on tiny cartoon generals isn't a new hook, though it rarely hurts a roguelite's chances.

60 unit types in the November demo

While the full game won't arrive until 2027 and has only been confirmed for PC so far, next week's Steam Auto-Battler Fest build won't be a tiny vertical slice. The limited-time demo covers the game's prologue and the Arid Wastes zone across six escalating difficulty tiers.

Players will have access to three playable commanders, 60 unit varieties, 25 enhancements, and more than 70 tactical cards during the week-long event. What I can't tell from the initial reveal is how readable the tactical side stays once hundreds of mutated vegetables and poultry start firing at the same time, though a 60-unit demo should answer that pretty quickly when it goes live on November 16.