![]() ![]() Combat is OK, but with limited abilities for each of the classes (or “jobs”), there’s rarely room to really mix things up. Battles mostly follow the events of the source material, though with obvious and necessary embellishments, omissions, additions and an often disjointed chronology. You can build a party of 14 gelflings (though you won’t field so many), including Rian, Gurjin and Naia. ![]() If you win, you move on, if you lose you can either try again or grind for XP in boring, inconsequential fights that exist purely to balance the poor difficulty and pacing. As a result, you just go to the places because they’re highlighted on the map and fight the battles. It’s fine to rely on your audience having knowledge of the source material to a certain extent, but as someone who isn’t a massive fan of the other Dark Crystal media, it’s not only difficult to follow but hard to give a shit about. The problem here is that the narrative is choppy, as Aughra attempts to peace together a recent series of events from the memories of individual gelflings, a conceit only expanded upon in static, partly voiced segments on the world map. BonusXP’s attempts to build a Tactics game set in that world, using elements from both the film and series to build encounters and inform the narrative. There’s no denying that Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal is a stone-cold classic, and Netflix’s prequel series does a very good job of recapturing what made it so good, despite losing a little of the innate creepiness of the original (which is more a product of the time – we’re just not easy to disturb anymore). Because I found BonusXP’s game to be incredibly hard – and not the kind of hard that makes me want to push on and overcome it, but the kind of hard that makes me want to just turn it off and play something else with more of a pay-off. I don’t judge the quality of a game by how much it frustrates me, although if I did Age of Resistance Tactics would either be sitting at a 2 or an 8 depending on which way your scale is skewed against it. Which is not to be taken as me praising the game. The simple truth, though, is that I was not prepared. It’s safe to say that I approached The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics with a fairly level head, having recently stared down my share of hefty challenges from its genre peers. I’ve been playing a lot of tactical RPGs lately, titles like The Banner Saga and Ash of Gods: Redemption, titles that have added layers to the simple formula made famous mainly by 1996’s Final Fantasy Tactics.
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