The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics Review
Spoiler Note: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics follows the same plot as its Netflix TV series counterpart. While this review is spoiler-free and the gameplay and screenshots shown were picked to avoid giving anything away, keep that in mind if you haven’t seen the show and want to go in completely fresh.
It’s 2020, but Netflix is still banging the drum for licensed tie-in games. Like Stranger Things 3: The Game before it, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics morphs the streaming network’s 2019 prequel TV series
to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal into game form – this time as a
tactical RPG akin to Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. It twists Age
of Resistance into a linear, combat-heavy experience, but ends up
feeling like little more than a hollow puppet of an RPG used to
capitalize on a beloved franchise. It’s passable enough to trigger some
Pavlovian response from both my love of tactics games and The Dark
Crystal series, but left me wanting in both regards once I really saw
what it had to offer.
In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll say that The
Dark Crystal Tactics covers the same general plot arc as the Age of
Resistance show. Like Stranger Things 3: The Game, many missions are
pulled right from sequences in the show, and new, well-drawn comic-strip
cutscenes retell key scenes with some flair. Despite this, the story
told here pales in comparison to the TV version. These moments, both
interactive and hand-drawn, are truncated in ways that seem tailored to
elicit memories of when you watched the show, rather than actually tell
its story. In between the very clear nods to Age of Resistance, the plot
moves far too quickly through strings of dialogue shown on the world
map between missions. I found it difficult to follow, even after
watching the first few episodes just before I started playing.
Screenshots From The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
As a result, even the centerpiece moments like boss fights
with the most prominent Skeksis from the show, feel hollow. All the key
characters – Gelfling, Skeksis, and otherwise – get a chance to stand in
the spotlight, but there’s next to no time spent on character
development. If you aren’t excited by the sight of them alone,
controlling or fighting them isn’t going to add much to the equation.
Even allowing for the liberties you have to take when condensing a full
season of plot into a roughly 15-to-20-hour combat-focused video game,
this version of the story feels like a hurried summary you’d get from a
friend – it hits the crucial details and can be enticing at times, but
never captures the emotion of any important moments.
Even at its best, combat is dragged down by poorly designed menus that take far longer to navigate than they should.
Setting aside its capacity for Dark Crystal fan service,
The Dark Crystal Tactics also evoked a bit of my nostalgia for tactical
RPGs, particularly original PlayStation-era games like Final Fantasy
Tactics and Vandal Hearts. Though its art style is not retro by any
means – it’s got a muddy, overly rendered look that’s more functional
than stylish – its turn-based combat laden with RPG-style abilities and
tiled maps full of environmental hazards and gimmicks definitely is. The
Dark Crystal Tactics gets the basics of that experience right, with a
strong emphasis on using skills to get the upper hand over enemies that
will likely beat you if you just trade blows until someone dies.
More than many other strategy RPGs, The Dark Crystal
Tactics also emphasizes turn order and timing as a means of controlling a
battle. A long bar at the top of the screen shows the next 10 character
turns, helping you to predict your enemies’ movements and plan ahead.
There are also a decent number of skills that allow you to move an
ally’s next turn up or push an enemy’s back, giving you the ability to
not only take stock of turn order, but manipulate it to your advantage.
Any character can also refrain from attacking or using an ability to
speed up their next turn, which cleverly incentivizes careful play over
taking wild swings. Predicting enemy behavior is a cornerstone of all
tactics and strategy games, but The Dark Crystal Tactics puts it front
and center.
But while the combat can offer some interesting decisions,
even at its best it’s dragged down by poorly designed menus that take
far longer to navigate than they should. You cannot, for example, cycle
through characters in the jobs or equipment menus, but instead must
select each character, then choose what aspect of their loadout to alter
one by one. In combat, you have to select “move” from a radial menu to
move, rather than just clicking on a character as it works in nearly any
other game from the genre. These inefficiencies, combined with fairly
long load times on Switch, make navigating menus both in and out of
battle tedious to the point where I sometimes avoided tinkering with my
party’s skills just to save myself the slog.
The Dark Crystal Tactics' greatest strength is its
progression, which is clearly a smaller-scale riff on the job system
from Final Fantasy Tactics. In addition to level, each of your Gelfling
and Podling fighters gains stats and abilities by choosing and leveling
up their class or “job.” Though the job tree is small – there are 12
classes, most of which adhere to broad roles like Mender (healer) and
Paladin (offense-focused melee fighter) – there’s a lot of room for
customization. Each person in your squad can only choose a finite number
of skills: three from their current, primary job, and two more from a
secondary job. By the time a character hits job level 10, the threshold
for advancing, they’ll have learned way more than three skills, so it’s
on you to choose skills that fit a role on your team.
The job system the system works better in theory than it does in practice.
Moreover, the classes are all complementary and feature
very little overlap, so there’s always a strong incentive to stay in a
lower class rather than absent-mindedly advancing up the ladder. Since
you only bring four or five people into each fight, it’s impossible to
create a flawless team, so you need to assemble your character loadouts
with an eye towards specific sets of skills and an overall gameplan for
how those skills combine.
However, the system works better in theory than it does in
practice. With such strict loadout limitations, some of the skills
become infinitely better than others, limiting character rotation
greatly. For example, many of the most powerful attack abilities for
Soldiers, like “Double Strike,” require you to mark enemies first. Mark
is a basic Scout ability, so I was compelled to keep the Scout job as a
primary or secondary for one or two characters at all times. While I
found myself wishing I had access to other abilities, particularly
passive and movement-related skills, they’re never as essential as the
few I grew to rely on.
Over time, new battle conditions will force you to mix
things up, but even that causes frustration. You’ll run into bosses that
are immune to the status effects you usually inflict; Poison swamps
demand skills that cure debuffs; Beach maps with rising tides require
extra speed. There are also plenty of missions that require you to focus
on an objective other than combat, like getting your team to an exit or
freeing Gelfling prisoners from cages, which push you to balance
engaging an enemy and achieving your goals. None of these twists are
very interesting or creative, but I appreciated the commitment to
environmental mechanics and theme missions to keep things fresh. On the
other hand, that commitment sometimes lead to boring situations where
I’d have to spend a dozen extra turns slowly moving to an objective even
after defeating all the enemies.
Bringing in someone with a
skill you unexpectedly need requires a lot of grinding optional battles
to whip those backups into shape.
“
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In a perfect world, your entire 14-character roster would
be leveled up and properly equipped at all times to allow you to swap
out different fighters to match each situation. However, since your
characters only level up in combat, bringing in someone with a skill you
unexpectedly need requires a lot of grinding optional battles to whip
those backups into shape. It rarely feels worth the significant effort
required, and I instead found myself trying to rejigger my default five
or six squad members to the best of my ability whenever a level had a
hard counter for my usual gameplan.
Though it wasn’t an insurmountable issue, every setback in
The Dark Crystal Tactics feels like a disproportionately big
inconvenience. Outside of the laborious menus, The Dark Crystal Tactics
also somehow relies exclusively on an auto-save system and does not
provide a way to quick-save in the middle of a battle. On Switch, you
can always pause by putting the console to sleep, but your save reverts
to the last time you were on the world map if you quit. Retrying a
mission after a death (or when you quit out, since there’s no easy
option to restart) requires you to sit through multiple loads, which can
lead to a lot of downtime if you get stuck.
For another Netflix show tie-in game, watch our review of Stranger Things 3: The Game above.
It’s also worth pointing out that the pre-launch Switch
version of The Dark Crystal Tactics used for this review suffered from
consistent bugs. Chief among them, backing out to the Switch home menu
and returning without quitting would cause hitching and, in some cases,
force it to crash entirely. Certain late-game cutscenes sped through
dialogue and had faulty audio. There’s also a story map late in the
campaign where highlighting certain panels would discolor a large
portion of the screen. As with any game these days, it’s entirely
possible that these issues will be patched out, but they were notably
more consistent and impactful than the pre-release hiccups I’m used to
seeing.
Verdict
Despite
being far less common nowadays, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
Tactics keeps the long tradition of the mediocre licensed game alive. It
does a decent job of aping ideas from some of the great strategy RPGs
that came before it, but doesn’t execute any of them as well. Couple
those missteps with its aggravating menus, and The Dark Crystal Tactics
quickly becomes more tedious than fun to play.
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