Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance Tactics Review

Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance Tactics is Netflix's latest tie-in game following the well-received Stranger Things 3 game. Dark Crystal Tactics manages to avoid the pitfalls of typical tie-in games by delivering a genuinely satisfying tactical RPG experience with cleverly designed battles, wide-open character customization, and enough strategic variety over its 50 levels to keep players engaged through its 20-25 hour campaign. It's not much to look at, but for tactics fans, there is a lot to love.

Book ≠ Cover

While Stranger Things 3 appealed to the fans of the show by letting them explore the familiar landmarks of Hawkins in SNES-style graphics, Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance fans probably won't find much here to fawn over.

Dark Crystal Tactics follows the same plot of the series by way of a small handful of cut-scenes scattered throughout the game. Each cut-scene is a short (10-15 second) series of hand-drawn images with comic book-style word bubbles. These are the epitome of low budget cut-scenes and are disjointed and condensed to the point of being confusing to anyone who hasn't watched the show.

The game itself is equally cheap-looking. While the characters are recognizable enough, the overall visual design is dated and unappealing. The animations are boring, there's practically no voice acting, and the environments are fairly basic. One might be mistaken in thinking this is a mobile game upon first inspection.

On top of all that, there is a mildly irritating lack of polish that persists throughout the entire game. Opening the command wheel causes the game to stutter, returning to the overworld often loads in the wrong textures, and the game hard 💎crashed for me at the end of two different battles.

And yet, despite all of these issues, Dark Crystal Tactics is a crunchy tactics game with loads of variety and one of the best class specialism systems I've ever seen. Each level feels crafted in a way that emphasizes the strengths and weaknesses of your team and encourages you to tweak and optimize for every situation. There are enough mission types that the levels never get stale or repetitive despite there being a surprising amount of content. Fans of squad-style turn-based tactics games like Mutant Year Zero, Into the Breach, and Pokemon Conquest will fall in love with the high stakes, claustrophobic combat in Dark Crystal Tactics.

Planning Out The Strongest Team

It takes quite a while for the game to open up to a point where getting nitty-gritty with your team composition matters, and while I think it benefits the player to ease them into making long term decisions for their team composition, the slow burn will likely turn a lot of players off before they can see the big picture. If you stick with it - and I'm talking about getting your core characters up to at least level 20 - the class customization becomes incredibly rich and satisfying.

There are three base classes to choose from for each character: Soldier, Scout, and Mender. Getting any class to level 10 will unlock two more Tier 2 classes that branch off of that class. Further, getting two particular Tier 2 classes to level 5 will unlock a Tier 3 subclass that is essentially a hybrid of two classes. Each character can have a primary and secondary class selected. Characters can have three skills from their primary class and two skills from their secondary class. This means there are 479,001,600 classes to choose from. When you factor in the 10 abilities available to each class, the number of ways to customize each character is essentially endless. And that's just for Gelflings. The other races, Podlings and Fizzgigs, have completely different specialization tracks and upgrade paths.

There 14 ꩲcharacters to unlock, each with their own unique spread of base stats. Additionally, e෴ach clan has its own bonus passive ability. Finally, each character has three equipment slots: weapon, armor, and trinket.

Only the primary class selected will gain XP, which really slows down the progression and forces players to kind of commit to five characters early on. Say, for example, you're training Brea to become a Song Teller, the hybrid class between Tracker and Adept. You'll need 10 levels in Scout, 10 levels in Mender, 5 levels in Tracker, and 5 levels in Mender before you unlock Song Teller at level 1. The minimum level to unlock Tier 3 classes is level 30, and while characters typically gain a level after every battle, it takes some long term planning to get to these hybrid classes.

Luckily, the journey there is as satisfying as the destination. There's a real sense of character growth as you complete stages, level up, and apply new abilities after every battle. It felt a bit strange investing in five characters while nine others went untouched, but there are repeatable battles available if you really want to grind more characters up. New Game+ is also a great way to level additional characters, as the difficulty increase requires a diverse roster.

For Tactics Fans, Not Dark Crystal Fans

The Dark Crystal wrapping on this robust tactics game leaves a lot to be desired, but those itching to get deep into a turn-based strategy game will find an absolute gem. It's rough around the edges, and there's more than one frustrating design choice here (the ability select wheel will make you want to pull your hair out the billionth time you accidentally select the wrong ability), but I can't help but feel, despite everything, that my time was well spent with this game.

A Switch copy of Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics was provided to TheGamer for this review. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is av꧙ailable now on Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.