Descent: Legends of the Dark - Pros and Cons

[Music] hey everybody welcome to drive through review 725 today we're going to take a look at descent legends of the dark now this is the new game from fantasy flight games that's kind of sort of a sequel to the second edition of descent although it's a lot different and so this review is going to be structured a little bit differently than my typical reviews uh the last couple reviews i did for kill team from games workshop and oath from leader games have all kind of sent me sideways in a lot of different ways and i'm kind of changing up the format a little bit not like permanently but just for special cases and this is definitely a special case there's a lot going on in this game in terms of what they've decided to change about kind of your typical approach to a dungeon crawl style game and so i'm going to have a bunch of time stamps below the video if you want to jump to some specific part of this this is basically going to kind of sort of work itself out to be like a top 10 list but not in the way that you might think i'm going to go over basically 10 points and talk about the pros and cons of each side so i'm going to go through these 10 things and then i'll have kind of a little summary at the end but going through the 10 things you'll have an impression of what i think of the game overall so let's jump into first of all before i start the 10 this is not a dungeon crawl like i think most people think of it's not like descent second edition isn't like hero quest or warhammer quest or any of that kind of thing it's more like journeys through middle earth or mansions of man the second edition although there's a bunch of dungeon crawling type of stuff that's going on in the game as well so let's just jump into the first thing that kind of sets it apart from all the typical dungeon crawls and kind of marries it more closely to a mansion's amanda's second edition of journey to middle earth and that is the story and i will say unequivocally where i'm just going to jump right into this sucker this is the absolute best 100 story game that i have ever played in terms of a tabletop board game experience without question in my mind in terms of just the storytelling side of it there's a lot of really interesting kind of moral or personality choices that the characters make and they do 100 percent affect the gameplay later on in the campaign i should say i finished the whole campaign but there's such a riches here to how the plot unfolds and how the different people are involved that i just want to open up right away and say 100 best story in a board game whatsoever period hands down and i'll talk more about this and probably a little bit more detail on some of the other points but there is one kind of sort of caveat i want to put to my statement of this is the best story sometimes there are what feels like little meaningless types of things that will happen not a ton and it actually seemed more meaningless early on in the campaign but when i got to the end of it i was like okay wow they really are kind of coloring in and filling in a lot of the blanks leaving you know some of the little details there for you to sort of fill in yourself in a way because there's certain points where you're like traveling along the map and you'll run into like a random encounter and really all that is generating some extra resources to use for crafting as you're going through your adventure but those little kind of like solid little i don't know breadcrumbs really kind of flesh out the world building and that kind of stuff and so it all kind of comes together at the end of the campaign feeling like you've really you know been in this place in this certain realm of tearing off and you know kind of been through something in terms of what the story is and how it unfolds but it can feel like a little bit meaningless in certain cases but where it really matters it doesn't feel meaningless at all and like i said some of the character choices and things that you can make in either little story driven events or parts of your little adventure you know dungeon crawl parts of the campaign that will show up uh later on and even though some of it doesn't necessarily show up in a super concrete way some of some of it certainly does but it's still again at the end of the day once you're done you're like okay i feel like all of these things have been really rounded out and well fleshed out so that's the story that's just a massive massive plus and it's probably honestly the biggest plus this game with all the other things going on in this game the story is the biggest part of it for me so that'll bring us to our second point and that is the app itself because it's an app driven game and the app actually facilitates the storytelling in a way that i think you know normal traditional components aren't quite capable of but the app also does a lot of other really really cool things one of the things it has is actually like a line of sight tool so if you're in the app and you can see where your characters are positioned or where the enemy character is positioned you can tap in there use a line of sight tool and see oh do these two have line of sight to each other in these spaces because sometimes with all the terrain and stuff that you can see it can be a little confusing to say oh you know okay do these corners match up in that so you can just go ask the app and it instantly will tell you yes these two can see each other or no they can't and that's a really neat thing the other thing the app you can do is adjust the difficulty level throughout the course of the campaign now it's not something i made use of but that's really a neat thing because if you want to just make it easier and be more about the story and kind of just going through uh the journey of the thing and not worry too much about winning and losing the scenario you can make it easier if you feel like it's too easy then you can ramp it up a couple of levels and that will really and that's just a really cool way to keep flexible and and kind of tailor the experience to whoever's sitting at the table there's a couple other things that it does as it maintains a pretty decent quest log so if you want to go back and say like hey what did that npc tell us and you can pull out the log and just go read it real quick or some of the scenarios will have more of a puzzle-driven clue-driven type of solution that you need to go through and you need to go back and look and say okay so this means this and this thing's that so you need to kind of really study that and having that being able to pull that up really quickly in the app you don't have to like take any notes or anything like that that's really really cool and then one other thing the app does is we'll talk more about this in the terrain section but the way the app sort of presents rolling out the terrain and this is kind of ubiquitous across all the fancy flight apps but i wanted to make note of it because the terrain can be pretty complex here in some cases and it the way it sort of slowly rolls stuff out to you it makes it easy to sort of build up whatever sort of scene that you're setting up you know do these couple of tiles here set this token do that do that here to put the monitors and it does it in a way that it's very uh conducive to the storytelling in terms of revealing like what's happening you know what happened when you opened the door and saw what you saw and that kind of stuff so there's a really good job of that now i will say i ran into a couple of hiccups with the app the app on my ipad was basically down for 24 hours a few days ago and there was just a bug they had and they were you know they fixed it and then it was that back up and running i didn't lose any of my save data or anything like that i did see i think two or three crashes over the course of about a 26 hour campaign um but the amount of time that i lost was we're talking like one minute maybe two minutes of time which had to roll it back and it never crashed during like you know the adventure part where you're doing combat and things like that it was just kind of moving from one sort of position to the next in the map and i maybe missed out and had to redo like a quick little story event or something not really anything to write home about but there were some hiccups and you know it was down for 24 hours i was a little bit nervous in that case now one big kind of knock for the app is in certain cases like when you want to go pull up the log and read it somebody's going to need to take the app away from the table where you have it presented and they could take it and read and spend some time and maybe you pass it to somebody else so that will kind of halt gameplay a little bit so that can happen and you know there's no voiceover at all and i think that's probably probably one of my main criticisms of the game in general i think there really should be voice over or at least the option to have it because sometimes there's like a lot of reading back and back to back right you'll be like two characters will be having dialogue and then you'll have some reading and everybody reads at a different pace right so that's a little bit tricky so like everybody done click everybody done click everybody to unclick you know and uh and so that can be that can be a little bit kind of annoying and stuff like that but some you know that just comes up periodically it's not like it's a constant throughout the whole campaign uh another thing is well i played on my ipad uh and i did fire it up on my phone and absolutely i would never play this on the phone even if i was just playing it solo just because it's so small and it's just not conducive to a phone so you really need like a tablet or a way to sort of broadcast it from your phone onto a larger monitor or tv screen anyway so that's the app the next one i want to talk about is the train now the train is amazing it's amazing um and and one thing this stores all the terrain so you have this bottom part of the box everybody's probably seen that and then you have the game stuff in here and all the terrain and tiles and stuff can be here on the bottom and it's really actually fairly easy to kind of organize it i mean it's not like really organized but i've sort of piled stuff in different piles so you know all my doors are in this corner and that stuff so it's easy to kind of pull that stuff out set it up and then get going and the terrain can get really intricate and really neat and the one of the coolest things about the game is you're not just like in a cave or in a castle or in a dungeon or in a thing you're moving from place to place so you might be outside then you're inside or you're in like a little town square and then you go into a tavern and then over here into a lab or into these different environments so the environments are shifting uh back and forth and this system here that they've come up with allows you to go in and out of these different environments and that is just such a cool thing i mean it's such a simple thing that's so well presented here it's just to me it's a freaking achievement uh what they've done now i will say when i first saw the game and saw kind of like the artwork on the tiles and the terrain i was like it's a little bit flat and it is um but i don't know the terrain pieces themselves i think are fine art wise the tile art on the tiles that could be better i'll be honest with you about that but to me it's such like a minor nitpick after playing to the rest of this game and because of what i just talked about in terms of moving from environment to environment and that kind of thing and setting up just really really neat tactical scenarios i mean i don't want to spoil things but there are certain things where frigging the terrain matters and the interaction and the marriage of not just like the combat tactics of the terrain but which npcs you have to interact with in all these kinds of different ways and where you have to be and where the monsters might be moving around and the different sort of environmental underlays like there might be lava and stuff or spike traps and stuff like that you might have to like go up on balconies and and all kinds of different stuff i mean there's it just they didn't just be like let's do this like little kitschy terrain thing that looks neat and it's like it just kind of i think they like said we're gonna do terrain and they went for it and they really really explore the space with it like really explore it and just it's so so awesome now bad part of that it can take up a absolute ton of table space now i play here on this it's a it's a game topper so it's like a you know nice game table with the watson and it's if you know the game toppers the watson sizes i think it's the second biggest or it's pretty close to the biggest so it's not a you know it's no slouch right you could not play this on a kitchen table um like a normal one you know if you had a giant one some people have a big kitchen table we just have like a little one there and you know you i couldn't even play it i could not play it on my kitchen table whatsoever so like a normal kind of gaming table no no chance now the thing is you could use the app this would be not an ideal experience but you can see the app sort of maintains what all the train looks like so if you get run out of room you can take a chunk of it you know like these two rooms set it off to the side or just tear it down and then make your room and then keep going now sometimes you'll we will have to like go back you know backtrack and go talk to this person or kill these monsters which you know came in here or whatever so you might have to set it back up um but there are certain times when you could probably just tear it down and it's and it's not going to affect the game because you're just kind of moving forward but you can always refer to the app and say okay well now we have to move back a room or something we could go kind of set that up or something so you could do that but yeah i mean that's that's going to be a big drawback for people because it like it literally i swear to you like it takes up there were some times where i could not fit it on my watson table because of how it sprawled out and it just was like it was huge it was huge um so just you know just know that going into it so the next one here we're going to talk about like the gameplay and the mechanics and just the card play and the you know all the combat stuff now the game has this really cool like card flipping mechanic you've got your character cards skill cards weapon cards and you're gonna be flipping those up and down back and forth and activating different effects putting tokens on them exhausting them and different things and sort of like configuring and building this little tableau of combos that each year characters are going to do and it's really really neat and the way that those tokens like interact with and affect your abilities is pretty cool because like as you go through the campaign you're going to add more skill cards and get other little cards and stuff like that little armor cards and trinkets and potions so adding more skills not only gives you more skills but it gives you more room to put tokens on so you can spend more exhaustion tokens or if you get like some nasty effect on you can put more or less you can spread those out a little bit more which is a bad thing but then you can also put more like focus tokens and reroll tokens and and flip tokens and all these things like that that allow you to re-roll dice or flip your cards for free and so it kind of opens up your space in terms of what you can do so that's just a cool mechanic there where you get like the skill plus hey you get a little extra room to do more stuff with that car you can spend more exhaustion tokens over here and you know your actions in the game are like you know move and attack and stuff and one of the actions is you can flip a card and so that's like preparing and then you so you can switch weapons you go from like a ranged weapon to a melee weapon or you flip your character card and it's like a whole new ability like a whole new not a stance but a whole kind of different take on your combat and so that's that's really neat now i will say it's it's like there isn't quite enough variety in terms of the asymmetry across the different uh characters and when you play through the app you're going to end up using all the characters no matter how many players you're playing with uh to me there's like i don't know it's it's hard to say this isn't i could see others having this as a nitpick or or criticism to me it was fine i thought it was you know the variety across the characters was just about right but it is a little samey it wasn't saying me to the point of like i'm bored or anything i'm just like well i've seen like a game like altar quest for example it's just the difference between the different characters is is a little bit more stark um and so i kind of you know kind of have to compare it to that but to me it was enough different there was enough kind of different things and the roles and things that they served uh were different enough like you got your tank and you got your healer types and your your more squishy damage dealers and stuff like that and so from that sort of conceptual perspective they are different enough but like the actual physical mechanics of doing certain things wasn't quite different enough for me to really kind of call it out so was this look a little bit samey there and i don't know i was just thinking well if i look at like games like you know warhammer quest or shadows of brimstone like their mechanics cross characters is not really different at all and i really like those games uh so to me it's different enough but i could see after playing games like altar quest and some other games like that you can say oh well it's it's not quite as you know evolved as it could be but to me that would be a big nitpick but i could see some other people that are more mechanics driven uh kind of citing that out but i really enjoyed it it was very tactical and very very fun and engaging all the way through each of the different adventures now speaking of the characters i'm going to talk about the character development like the progression the leveling up and all that stuff but first i want to talk about the story side of it because as the story sort of unfolds from the beginning all the way to the end of the campaign each character has their own kind of special piece of the adventure of the story they have their own kind of input and i thought that was really neat like there's no like one messianic savior character uh really now there are some characters which you might look in the political landscape landscape and say they're kind of the more important person but the team really kind of comes together over the course of the campaign and they each have their own kind of invested interest in all the stuff that's going on in the world itself and over the course of adventure and what they can contribute and all that kind of stuff amazing i mean that's just again going back to point number one i'm like this is a special game right because of this kind of stuff and like i said your personality your kind of moral choices do matter they do crop up back probably in like the last quarter last third of the campaign um so those really come up um but and i'm to kind of go circle around a little bit here so there's a little bit kind of a strangeness with the progression though in terms of like leveling up skills and getting new weapons and stuff like that like there's a ton to it but then i like didn't touch a lot of it either and the way that you get skills is a little bit strange a little bit on rails in some ways but i think if i were to play it again it might be different a little bit so i'll have more say in that point but i think if you were to sit down and play it through and i've talked to some other folks here and they said yeah it's like you level up and stuff and then once you get to like a certain part of the game it's like you don't really develop too much in terms of your skills and and that kind of thing anymore and it's like why didn't i get access to this or that and so maybe there's some randomness involved or maybe it's like there's cards in the box that are probably going to come up more in the expansion or something but there was like a lot i didn't get to which is actually not a bad thing but it just felt like hmm i didn't really get much choice here in terms of what i could you know sort of go up or down my tech tree with my characters it wasn't none but it was just hmm it seems like that part was a little bit soft i'll talk about this point here and then another point when we talk about crafting each of the characters has this thing called feats and so you you actually control these in the app itself and what happens is when your character does a certain special type of action it's like a little i don't know like a little subquest or personal quest in a way it's like when i go into a scenario i want to be doing these kinds of things with this character and that will unlock other things and so maybe some of this you know development is triggered by these feats and me choosing different feats because after you complete one feat you get a little bonus it might be item stuff or it might be a skill or might be all kind of materials or something and then you choose from one of their two feats and then you go to that one and then you've got to sort of do the actions to finish that and and then you go in there and then you do it and you keep doing these different feeds so if you play certain characters more than others if they're going to kind of level up a little bit sort of not on par with the others which is fine it's not a big deal because they the game does take steps to kind of level everybody up as a whole overall so kind of generally but definitely if you spend more time on one character they're going to do more feats and stuff like that now the thing with that is that's all controlled in the app so you kind of have to kind of remind yourself to go in and look at it there's a little button at the bottom that will sort of faintly light up yellow because i think i've done like a whole scenario and i was like oh i should have clicked a button and then leveled up the feeds it'd be nice if it like made a noise or something and would like annoyed you until you clicked it and then selected your next feat um but you have to go in there and when you're playing with other players and stuff you probably won't even notice it at all because i did play it solo end with other people but it's a really cool thing it's just a nice aspect of it but we'll talk more about like development you know game wise in a minute so that's the character development again the stories stuff is just whoo out of this world now the next piece we're going to talk about the price because i see i mean i looked at the price and i was like 180 170 180. now you can get at discounts online my local store does discounts i've seen like 140 to 150 so i mean it's it's you know 20 30 bucks cheaper that's nothing to sneeze at um but i think one billion percent this is the price it should be especially at like a 140 or 150. now you can compare and i've read some stuff online where like well it's not fair to compare it to a kickstarter project that has you know like a billion minis or whatever and stretch goals one billion percent it's good you should compare it to a kickstarter because this blows 98.78 percent of kickstarters out of the water probably 99.99 kickstarters out of the water because this is a ground up risk of a project this is a this is a risk this is a new innovation this is this is what kickstarter should be for right this should be this probably could have been on kickstarter because it's got an app it's got this crazy box i mean it comes with the storage solution which is often a stretch goal of a kickstarter usually you get a kickstarter you get this and you get these stretch goals and you got to pay extra add-on 20 30 40 bucks for the little storage solution this comes with it so if it's at 150 knock down 30 for the storage solution and hey i don't make the rules so now you're looking at like you know just over 100 bucks okay um but you've got the terrain stuff you've got the app stuff you've got all the story stuff you've got the cool miniatures very very good high quality miniatures some probably the absolute best that fantasy flight's ever done um games workshop level pretty close i mean pretty close um it just i mean it to me 140 150 bucks a no-brainer piece of cake you know if if this is something it looks like you will enjoy of course if you don't look like you enjoy it then why would you pay that um i don't really have a bad point to this because to me the price is what it should be uh it's 100 worth it now the msrp 180 get like 170 i'm like oh this is steep but you can get it for a discount you can get it for a discount and you could probably skip a kickstarter or something or not buy two games and then save up for this over the course of two months i mean that's okay save up money for a game because this is worth saving your money for if this is your kind of game uh so i think the price is 100 appropriate and it probably is a deal it's really a steal i i did 26 hours of this and we'll talk more about this in another point but i would play it again i would play through this again all right that's the price next thing circling back to kind of point number one is the the world building and i made this kind of point earlier i shouldn't have done it i got a little carried away but that meaningless stuff that i talked about before like i said that really helps the world building uh there's a there's a handful of side quests i think there's only two kind of real side quests but it could be just the way i went through the campaign but there's other like events and things that happen that are sort of like side events and tie back into the main you know quests and dungeon dives and whatnot you're going to go on and then there's a little kind of random encounters as you travel along the map and all that kind of stuff and those feel more or less meaningless but again after finishing the campaign you're like okay now i have a real sense for this this this world and this kind of universe that these folks are creating and i think that's an important part of this because you know it just really adds to the immersion the the sort of compassion that you feel for not just your characters but some of the npcs and some of the events and things that happen because it really grounds it all this kind of little world building details really ground it and i'm going to talk about this again in the final thoughts i think it really helps the game and i will say um it's nice because i've kind of seen them over the last couple of years starts try to start to set tearing off apart because you know the original descent games the roon bound battle lore um that kind of stuff it's just kind of like a warhammer fantasy knockoff kind of thing right or tolkien-esque i found it more like old-school it's like old-school warhammer fantasy without the kind of the the edginess crap and uh and less funny too than warhammer fantasy used to be um so they've really kind of taken some steps here to set them set their races and their people and the sort of the personalities and stuff apart uh legacy dragon holt which is a game i think i reviewed that i like that one okay it was pretty good and i really like the world building and that and they really kind of build up a little bit more on top of that um so that's good it's kind of setting it apart and there's some interesting dynamics here between you know some of the different typical race relations and stuff like that you know it does it mixes it up it doesn't really phone it in in that regard so i just want to call that out a little bit now the last or sorry not the last the next part is is crafting and i think this is where a lot of the replayability which is my next point is going to come into because the crafting in the app interface is really really neat and it's fun to sit there even with people and sh and kind of uh quibble about what how you want to sort of upgrade and tweak different weapons and which recipes you want to craft because think of it like if you play like diablo or world of warcraft or those kind of games we have like little sockets and you can add like little procs and stuff to your different weapons or choose your different weapons once you unlock those that's a really really fun thing to kind of tinker around and you get the resources and materials just kind of come to you just over the course of game just by opening chests and running into random events you just kind of get resources thrown at you which is fine you just get like a bunch of crap and then you can sit down and you know sit there and tinker and i've sat there you know for a while and be like okay what do i want like the five percent chance to double my damage or do i want the 25 percent you know chance to i don't know stun the enemy or something right so you can go tweak or you know proc an extra action for another hero there's all kinds of little weird things you can go in there and do and the interfaces is pretty good um it's a little bit unclear at first and i think i probably had played through almost almost half a dozen quests before i figured out okay this is a recipe this does that and then if i do this oh here's how i switch a weapon you know and so it could have been a little bit better introduction there and i would just probably suggest if you're coming at this new spend some time with that interface to kind of real figure out what does what and probably go on board game geek and stuff and you know ask questions about it because i've definitely seen other people kind of struggle with that at the beginning it's like what am i supposed to do now how do i craft these can i take these with me this you know what does this do it's not terrible like you can just kind of go and click around and you'll be stumble your way right to there and the app sort of just takes all that in in in its brain right and then applies it so you don't have to track all of that stuff because it gets pretty like fine grain between each character's two weapons and they can each weapon has two slots and you can pick like i think i got up to four on one of the weapons like four different things i could put this one slot on the weapon and then two or three on the others most of them i got up to two or three different ones so you're looking at like you know four to six seven eight options for one weapon for one character and they each have two weapons so you can play around with that but it's really a neat thing and this is really something that you know i've i mean obviously we've never seen this in a board game so other than like a little stumbling block there with the the app ui it's just it's such a cool thing and i think the replay ability is going to come into this whole like item bit because there's so many weapons and stuff that i was like i don't i haven't seen any of these like there's and i finished the thing i'm like i did everything i think i could possibly do every little side quest and everything and i didn't see any of these weapons and you know where did these come from and maybe i didn't like open the right treasure chest or something but it is random too i've seen online where people go well i open that chest completely different result that probably based on who opens it and how successful you were and what skill you used to open it all that kind of stuff so anyway so that's crafting really neat i mean it's it's very innovative it's a very very cool different thing that we haven't seen really in a tabletop game all right so last two points here number nine a replayability now as i said a couple of points back i would i really want to play this again i played through it mostly solo uh took 26 hours i played one scenario with two friends of mine so we played like a three player game the rest of it was all solo and i fully regret soloing it all the way because this experience i i wish i should have just had with some friends of mine because it's just really that fun now what i would do next time is and this is the tricky part of it is i think the trickiness of reading some of the stuff is going to kind of affect that because i really want to like spend a little bit more time reading and not necessarily blowing through because some of the dialogues i was like okay yeah yeah okay got it got it not too much but there are certain points where i just kind of knew the outcome of the dialogue just because you know i don't know i'm 45 so i've read stories before anyway so and if i was sitting there with a group of people i am of the mind i want to play with people but i also want to sit there and do the whole reading thing so if they did a voiceover then a thousand percent i would do this but i also want to play it again to kind of take my time with the story because i was really excited during the course of this play to get into the next scenario and get into the fun combat and setting up the train and seeing what kind of surprises this scenario is going to throw at me and so part of me wasn't necessarily that i was like bored with the story obviously because i've just been raving about it for i don't know how long but i really wanted to get to the next piece to see what happened so i'm of the dual mind there i want to play it again with people and i want to but i want to play it a little bit slower through the story again just kind of like take it in because i really did enjoy it and then i also want to kind of crank up the difficulty level because i played on just the standard difficulty level and i lost three out of like the 15 or 16. now two of them were because i was doing something wrong one of them i straight lost because just i don't know i think you might you might be supposed to lose it i i don't know i don't want to spoil anything because there's once there i'm like i don't know how you would ever win this and i feel like you should never win it because the way the story went although if you did win it i mean it's not like it's not winnable but it was just really hard and then i thought okay well maybe you're supposed to lose it and it's part of the deal but i was like oh no because the way the tone changes if you lose a scenario versus the next one so you just kind of like keep going in the story but it'll change up the tone and the wave the dialogue a little bit i'm pretty sure uh so anyway i i technically only lost i mean i technically lost three but i really lost one zero because i i realized i was doing the ability dice wrong and i was like oh okay the ability test thing it's a thing so i was like well if i did that a thousand percent i would have won both those scenarios because i almost beat him anyway but playing on ultra hard mode that i shouldn't have been doing but i really want to ramp up the difficulty level a little bit too now the other problem with this in terms of replayability is that this that idea is not going to be for everybody wanting to play the same story again i would really like it if they did a sandboxy kind of mode like some of these guys back here the warhammer quest games or shadows of brimstone uh because this system here like overlaid a kind of like roguelike um kind of infinite progression procedurally generated sort of campaign thing where you just you know you focused on leveling up your characters not so much on like a concrete story i think that would be really neat i mean as much as i've raved about the story to sort of apply this system to that kind of thing and just you know just make the monsters progressively harder just try to level up your guys and just do that whole dungeon crawl kind of thing driven through the app with the mechanics and all that stuff i think that could be really neat um but yeah that's just a personal thing i like those sandboxy kind of games you know like brimstone and warhammer quest games um that's that would be neat so that would make this that would take the replayability question kind of out of the picture and i really think they would be cool to do like really like go in for that but i don't think that they will but i mean i think that that's like the crown jewel of a game i'm looking for with this kind of experience in terms of the presentation and everything and some of the stuff the app can do um i think that'd be sweet to have less like infinite mode you just keep playing and level up your characters and get access to all the items and stuff that'd be cool all right so that's replayability uh number 10 would be let's compare this to you know other dungeon crawls which i just kind of did so if we compare this to descent second edition the sense that condition is a tiny baby compared to this game and i throw imperial salt in there and i've got still got imperial salt on top of the shelf there there's no reason to have games like that anymore because imperial assault which i played all the way through and i played a chunk through descent and i also played descent's app version um with road to legend or whatever which is terrible i mean honestly like honestly not terrible compared to this app i would say playing through that kind of story driven campaign like imperial assault or descent to where you go through and there's a dm and you go through you know missions and you maybe do a little side missions and stuff like that just awful compared to playing through this i mean we finished improving assault and by the end end of that i was like i think i kind of hate this now i love improve so i'll still have it for the skirmish mode and that kind of thing but the way that you kind of go through a story and this will go back to like the original hero quest game where you have a dm and in other players having the dmv in the app itself fantastic the way that it can present the story to you uh some of the things that they can do this to me just kind of fixes over that style of gameplay that kind of old school hero quest descent style gameplay now there's other games like you got your altar quest which to me in terms of the card mechanics and everything alterquest is is my favorite dungeon crawl in terms of just pure like gameplay board game mechanics um so this this gets kind of gets close to that but i still got to give the nod to altar quest gloomhaven i would probably have to give a little bit of a not to there um but then like i talked about the sandboxing stuff the replayability that is my jam like that's my thing um brimstone the old warhammer quest that stuff is just really really cool and that's kind of my jam so that kind of comparison if you want something that is you know not going to be linear then this isn't really going to be for you because you're going to play through the story and most people i think won't want to play through it again i will but um on hard mode and all that stuff like i said but you know to me though this sits in its like own kind of weird space too so anyway my only kind of thing with that would be like it'd be cool if they had the other mode which i already talked about so that's kind of the top 10 things that i wanted to kind of talk around both sides of um i don't have much of this else to say although i think like i said kind of really kind of comes back to the price side of it in terms of my final thoughts of hey if you can pick this up for you know let's say 140 150 and you think about this in comparison to a kickstarter that kind of sucks or is like okay um this is this is what kickstarter should have been for and what a kickstarter game what it would be is but the thing is this is so well developed and polished and just there's so many facets like i feel like this game was was made by okay let's talk about the designers here kara central dunk and nathan hodgek i don't know who those people are this game can't have just been designed by those two people though like there was a complete from the bottom up design from this whole product for all the different pieces the folks that developed and designed the app that wrote the code whoever came up with the punch boards for the terrain and all that fun stuff and the way that the game design marries with the story all this kind of stuff that i've talked about for the last probably 30 or 40 minutes this is just such like a beautiful achievement and an innovation and i don't know if this will be my game of the year but it's going to be right at the top right at the top the only reason it would not be my number one game of the year is just from like my personal sort of taste of if i sit down to play a game i'd probably rather play you know this game or that game or this style of game or that style of game but like i think for me sort of if i look at myself objectively not objectively for everybody obviously but myself objectively this is the best game played probably a long time like years years there you go get it recommend up and down whenever you can hate me if you don't like it it's great [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Drive Thru Games

Views: 9,028

Rating: 4.8663483 out of 5

Keywords: board game, card game, review, Descent, Descent: Legends of the Dark, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Terrinoth, Fantasy Flight Games

Id: 80VPqh4DQ4o

Length: 38min 39sec (2319 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021