I am pretty far along, and my starting lineup is 20+

THE LOOK AND FEEL:

Considering Netflix has more money than god, this feels very low budget. From modeling, to avatars, to combat, it all feels like a decent IOS game vice a solid PC tactics game.

The menu gives you next to no options. The UI has real issues. It looks dated and explains nothing. I was just playing some old C&C games recently and I am not being hyperbolic when I say the UI felt similar to those. Yeesh.

I'd bet my bottom dollar they used the default font in whatever software they worked with. It's like reading a sign a coworker printed out for the work fridge.

There's almost no voice acting, the soundtrack is nice but limited to two songs... and there's way less art work than I would have thought.

Still, I keep playing it.

It's the friggin' Dark Crystal universe. Wholly unique and wonderful and sincere. I love that about it.



HOW IT PLAYS:

The combat is totally passable. There are some synergies you can explore at later levels which gives you something to look forward to.

Also, it's not pay to win.

However, the in-game store (where you buy gear for your roster) doesn't allow items to be recycled or traded back in. The store reveals higher tier items seemingly at random. This makes it tough to know when to save and spend. Your only income are pearls (which you only get upon completing a mission). The prices of higher tier items aren't MMO grindy, but you'll never have top gear on several characters at once. My power level might read 178, but then I only hit for 68. Why? Armor? Not sure. It makes it impossible to really min/max your moves.

The jobs and class system is not bad in theory. You can level two jobs and then create a new more powerful job. Sounds cool, but how do you earn XP for your secondary jobs? I don't know. The game doesn't tell you squat. My secondary jobs don't seem to be leveling at all after several battles' worth of XP. I am pretty sure they only way to level a job is to set it to 'primary'.

But then... say you level your soldier to 10 (and get three skill slots to use from the soldier's 7-10 actual skills) if you switch solider to a secondary role, you now have only two skill slots and you have three slots in your new unleveled primary job/class. You now have a bunch of skills you unlocked you can't use.

The game also switches your characters loadout based on the primary job you've chosen.

Ex:The Stroyteller advanced job combines scout and mage classes, but once you switch your primary from mage to scout, you have to use and wear scout gear. You now have a character with a bunch of mage skills you unlocked (all require MP) with a now smaller mana pool... and a dagger. It's like a bad Skyrim build.

Way I see it, you have to take two steps back in terms of power in order to take three forward.

Sound fun?

Also, there are 'encounters' on the map which are kinda like skirmishes. They help you earn XP and pearls and keep some characters at or above level. At first I thought, this is a great way to keep my roster up to snuff! I can try out different combos! Tavern brawls whenever I want!

But the problem is that encounters level up at random. Your bench players quickly become underleveled. Half of my roster is unusable. They just fall behind and there's no easy way to get them caught up.

Have a level 7 soldier you'd like to use? The encounter is now level 14. Too bad little one.

I tried bringing one low level character in a 5-man encounter. My team wiped and that encounter now says 'completed' Even though I was defeated.

So...



SHOULD YOU BUY THIS GAME:

For 20 bucks? Maaaaybe. Ugh. I guess? Probably not. There are better tactics games for less.

With more polish and some performance issues ironed out, I would say yes, buy it right then.

But we're in now, now.

When will then be now?

Soon...

(gulp) I hope.

So unless you are a die hard Jim Henson fan (which I am), I would wait and see if the team begins to engage the community and drop news about updates before you buy.





HOW TO MAKE THE GAME BETTER BECAUSE I DON'T JUST WHINGE

CC skills aren't reliable. The wording of the skill leads you to believe it will just work. My stun, stuns like 25% of the time. How is it being resisted? Who knows. Probably just RNG. So is there a way to increase stun chance? Nope. Is there even a way in game to test builds? Nope.

Because of this, damage reigns supreme. No point in trying a stun a minion with 213 HP, only to end up doing 48 damage, when you could just do 128 damage with a normal attack and save your MP.

You can't unequip items either. You can swap in an item, but you can't remove an item. This is a game about characters and items... and yet you cannot complete the most fundamental video game task. Nintendo games in 1986 let you unequip items. We are in 2020.

At least one encounter on the map should allow you to choose it's level (the podling tavern would be great for this). Hell, make a custom encounter on the map that lets you choose the layout and enemy roster. Actual fun!

Show all items in the store from the get go... for the love of Thra.

Let us choose between default and currently equipped armor appearances.

The skill circle needs it's size or transparency adjusted so you can actually see what's happening. Icon size needs tweaked and the icon's names actually fall out of the circles. It looks like powerpoint.

We need a way to reset character skills, or adjust them or SOMETHING. As you progress through the game, your tactical options actually become more narrow and therefore more repetitive.

Seriously, the font. You already have the Dark Crystal and Jim Henson fonts on file. They're great! Use them. We only see them on the main screen, then it's hours of reading 'Arial Black'.



I will update this once I beat the game, if I can stomach the journey. Thanks for reading, and go watch the show. It's beautiful.

First and foremost, at least for me, it has ACTUAL turn order, none of that "all your side goes, then all your enemies go" that just encourages dogpiling and prevents all kinds of time-based mechanics (haste, slow, stun, etc.) from being applicable.

With that said, I'd really say this game is pretty solid - not mind blowing, but solid. It uses many of the Final Fantasy Tactics ideas - elevation, for example - while introducing a few of its own. Rather than missing you 'glance', doing reduced damage and no extra effects, thus protecting against an unlucky streak of misses against an enemy at a shred of health, while also allowing you to build evasion-focused characters.

The aesthetic is lovely, the art in the cutscenes is delightful.. ultimately I feel pretty happy about this purchase. And, I mean, especially considering it's only $20, totally lower than I had expected. I will say that if you haven't watched the new Netflix series at all this could be a little spoily, but there's enough detail and such missing that it'd be plenty fun to watch afterwords anyway, I think.

A surprisingly solid Tactics-style game from a recently revived IP that nobody asked for.. but I'm sure extremely happy to have.

First of all I am 35 and grew up playing Final Fantasy Tactics and original X-Com, and I've played a lot of the new X-com and X-Com 2, they're some of my favorite games and I know them in and out. This game is definitely a simpler version of those games. If you like tactics games and Dark Crystal, this would probably be a fun distraction. I beat it in a few days, I don't think it has a lot of replayability but I may play it one more time. Basically it is challenging enough to be engaging, I put it on hard and I often lost battles and had to try them again. Even the level up side battles are often tough to win. There is a decent variety in abilities and combinations you can use for different strategies. Some of the levels are creative and interesting, like levels where water rises and falls and you have to play around it. Or levels where you are trying to get from one point to another without having to kill all enemies. (hint, don't forget about flying) There is some problems though, mostly from the feeling that the game could've been a lot better if they put more into it. It ends a little quick, and some of the tier 3 jobs don't seem worth the time. The items could've been better, all of the special weapons and armor you get from beating bosses are outclassed by the top level stuff you can buy. The Dark Crystal fantasy element is ok but not really that engaging, it mostly takes from the new tv show. I loved that show and it was fun to play as Hup and the Fizzgigs and Brea and Deet, but it didn't really add much to the story or characters. The cut scenes are simple without dialogue or fancy visuals. All in all, if you're looking for a fun strategy distraction during quarantine, you could do much worse than this. It's worth 20 bucks and the time playing it in my mind, but I wouldn't say it's a must play if you are into strategy and tactics games. However, it's fun enough and it doesn't really take too long. Final note, I'm on the final boss level still, the Emperor had 4800 HP and I got him down to 30 and lost. I will probably finish it soon.

While it's clearly a lower budget game, it's quite fun. The Jobs and abilities systems are pretty simplistic, but the stages provide a good challenge, and you do need to manage your loadouts efficiently. Although there is basically zero voice acting or true cutscenes, the comic style cinematics and graphics have a decent art style, and it stays pretty close to the story and feel of the series.

This is a game specifically for people who enjoy grid-map tactics turn-based RPGs. It is also a game specifically for people who have seen and enjoyed the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which itself is a show specifically for people who have seen and enjoyed the Dark Crystal. This title is pretty niche, but it's a niche I happen to occupy, and if you occupy this same niche, you will have fun with this game.

Dark crystal and Tactics games combined? Wow neat, but clunky interface and too much grinding to say it's a good PC game. I can't fault the graphics or sound or the story i experienced.

If you're looking at this one because you enjoyed FF Tactics, or even the Dark Crystal films, you'll be sorely disappointed. Clunky and boring gameplay. It lacks options or diverse characters. I lost interest after about an hour when I realized that every new battle is just more of the same.

The only person (because people is being optimistic) I could recommend this game to is someone whose number one video game is Final Fantasy Tactics, and whose all-time favourite film is The Dark Crystal. Otherwise, I can't think of why anyone would want to play this over the myriad of turn and tile-based tactics games that have existed over these past few decades, and have long improved upon since. If there's a mistake the turn-based tactics genre has made in the past, be it a painful user interface, poor level balance, a necessity to grind that affects the flow of the story, or too many mechanics spread too thinly, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics does it willingly, and does so even in New Game Plus.

You could instead be playing Enchanted Arms.

Despite the amount of hours I've put into the game, having all the achievements and buying the trading cards, this was not because I enjoyed the game, rather because I had to see everything to know that I would have no reason to return to it. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is mercifully shorter in its New Game+ mode thanks to insanely more powerful items with greater stat boosts and effects than before, and levels stop meaning just about anything despite enemies always managing to say they're more powerful. Not to mention it adds nothing new to the experience; it's only there to say if the game was too short, you can play it again.

You could instead be playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

The truth is the game isn't too short, rather the opposite, but it doesn't use the 20 hours I spent grinding levels to get to where I needed to be in my first playthrough at all well. The developers clearly knew enough about the Netflix show to pad out what can only be described as a "90s movie tie-in game except it's not as good as the Disney ones" (which should be a genre, only with a catchier name). Lazy is not a word I'd use to describe any game or developer, and Age of Resistance is no exception. Rather, it commits to making a bad game. Whether this is for some compensation, tax scheme, a statement on the human condition or quite simply punishment for Gamer Rage in general, I'm not entirely sure. I'll take the last one though, I don't think I deserve games better than this with how I rant, but surely the late and great Jim Henson and the success of his properties post-mortem deserve better.

You could instead be playing The Age of Decadence.

Mechanically, it's very much like all other RPGs that have stats which are incalculable and you just have to hope that bigger is better. Which, thankfully, is true of The Dark Crystal. Damage, health and magic pools are easily read and mostly understandable, but knowing if a hit will be a glancing blow or a crit, you can't say for sure. Magic and physical defence are just as nebulous concepts, as if thrown in because "that's what video games do". They're not wrong on that I suppose. However, what stops Tactics from being like other turn-based JRPGs with verticality is how everything takes more time than it should. You can't simply right click on an enemy to perform an attack. You have to click on your current character, navigate the radial wheel, select the ability, select the enemy if you're in range. If not, move. If you're still out of range, undo the move and retry. It sounds like a silly thing to get worked up over, but it's the way one interfaces with the game and it's an immediate annoyance. The only way to overcome this is to play more aggressively with better equipment, so you can end fights faster. But to do that you need to grind for Pearls to buy said equipment, and to grind you have to get into combat.

You could instead be playing Fallout.

But as far as The Dark Crystal influences go, there's not that many. Tilesets are overused, with landmarks and other points of interest barely having any presence in the deadened woods, murky swamps and a sandy level. There's also painfully little to no voice acting, with some squarks from the Skeksis characters and not much else, not even for the few "cutscenes" which are comic book panels fading in and out, not even daring to bother footage from the show it's based on. There's appearances from the antagonists and plenty of named characters but beyond that, not a whole lot else that makes you feel like you're playing the show itself, and hardly a loose adaptation at that.

You could instead be playing Divinity: Original Sin.

Movie tie-in games have come too far for this to get my praise. In a world where we had the Battle for Middle-Earth games, Arkham Asylum, Mad Max, Alien: Isolation, The Godfather 1 & 2 and most recently Spiderman, this feels over 20 years out of place. If you want a tactical JRPG there's no shortage of them on Steam with far greater replayability, skill requirements and are memorable in every other way.

You could instead be playing literally anything else.

Solid casual tactics game, if you are into the genre I highly recommend to play in hard mode from the start, I played the first few missions on normal and I was getting really bored, hard makes you think about units placement and priorities a lot more and when I changed difficulty suddenly the mechanics got more interesting. I'd place it somewhere between Mario Rabbids and Mutant. The main loop consists in doing main missions that follow the show storyline while using side ones to acquire equipment and level up, there's no permadeath so you can always make a story mission easier by grinding side encounters first. Pawns that "die" during a battle get less experience (half?) so there's still an incentive of trying to keep everyone alive. Considering that it's a low budget game from a small studio the story is surprisingly well recreated. Don't expect cinematic cutscenes, it's just text most of the time, but the battles often recreate the show key moments, a shame that they've not integrated clips from the show

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The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is a tactical turn-based strategy game based on the Jim Henson movie and then the Netflix TV series.

The story is simple, help the Geflings against the Skeksis. To fully understand the background lore, I would suggest that you go watch the TV series. I have not seen the TV series, but I did watch the movie in 1982 (yes, I know I am old).

The game has three difficulty levels built in along with a tutorial. Everything is easy to understand.

When you play, you will see a map with various nodes that take you to different battles. Most of these are story-related, some of them are not. If you need to be stronger for certain fights, you can use these individual nodes to grind for levels.

The game goes from battle to battle, so understanding the lore is not really all that important. In these battles, you will select party members. It is advisable that you level up the lower level characters so that everyone keeps up.

During the battle, each party member has a primary job. There are three different jobs and with leveling up, you can unlock a secondary job as well. Each job has its own abilities for variability.

Each battle is different, and you will find out the objective as you play. You will have to kill all enemy units in some, while others involves you making a clean escape, etc.

Winning a battle will earn you experience points, loot, and also money, all used for progression. If you fail, you can just go to redo these missions.

They are absolutely beautiful, everything appears right out of the TV show.

There is no spoken dialogue. The music is awesome.

You can play the game completely using a Mouse, a Keyboard, or a Controller. I tried all three, and I prefer using the Mouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlz6Mk1o0XA

In Europe the price is €16.79 which is absolutely fair. You get enough playtime and quality of game out of this money. It’s regional priced also (USA $19.99).

As mentioned above, I never watched the TV series, and I had seen the movie a long time ago that I cannot remember much from the story. After spending some time with the game, I now want to go watch the series so I can understand the story better.

One thing to note is that you really do not need to understand the story the enjoy the game. You go from battle to battle and so the story is a bonus, not a must. This style of progression may be boring for some people. However, the battles are tactical and not too long--the ideal combination.

If you love tactical turn-based games, I would recommend this game. For people who are new to the genre, this is not a bad starting point either, as it's fairly easy even on Normal difficulty.

Overall score: 7.5/10

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.