A game review of Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Tactics on the Nintendo Switch.

Here is what to expect in this game review

First I'll begin with a quick overview of what to expect from this game.

Half-way through this review I'll describe some of the things this game delivered the best on, and areas where it failed in my expectations.

At the end I'll wrap up and this game a rating based on Story, Graphics, Gameplay, Fun, and Overall Value.

If you get nothing out of this, I think the screenshots included in this review should help others a get a good idea what to expect. There might be some minor spoilers included, but I'll try not to give away major portions of the plotline, which mirrors the story in the Netflix series.

Overview

Welcome to the world of Thra. The weird alien world suffering from a magical virus spreading througout the land known as The Darkening. Here, the elf-like gelflings are about to suffer genocidal war against the evil skeksis.

Brave heroes like Rian, Brea, and Deet must recruit allies to help defeat their foes. Together they will try to unite the land against the skeksis by finding the dual blade.

Aughra, the mysterious ancient guardian of Thra provides some help along the way. She is the only person who knows how to stop the The Darkening, because she shares an affinity with The Dark Crystal and has been studying the coming apocolypse known as The Great Conjunction since the beginning of time.

Upon starting to play through this game, one of the most important screens to become familiar with is the party screen.

Here we can choose equipment for party members to wear. Gelflings and Podlings can equip a weapon, armor, and a trinket. Each will raise the stats of the character, and sometimes offer additional circumstantial benefits.

Unfortunately, this game fails to offer any real strategy when choosing most items. Ultimately, I found myself battling to hoard money to purchase the most expensive items, which were always the most effective to use.

I enjoyed the fact that changing the weapon also alters the visible weapon the character is holding to match.

Jobs and abilities are also set from the party menu.

Gelfings can initially train up as a Warrior, Scout, or Adept. From there they can train their way into becoming one of 6 advanced classes. By multi-classing two of the advanced classes, you can unlock one of the 3 elite classes.

Podlings have their choice of 5 total classes, and you have your choice of two routes to achieve the advanced classes.

There are two different unique Fizzgigs in the game. One learns abilities focused on healing and protection, while the other gains battle type abilities.

Being a Strategy RPG, during battles you can assign a certain number of party members to participate in each mission.

Turns of upcoming characters are shown in order across the top of the screen. With so many enemies and gelflings that have similar face icons, I found it very difficult to identify which person's turn was coming up.

On each person's turn they can make one movement action, and then they can use one ability action or attack.

Every movement and action also causes the character to move in an animated way. This is actually a bit fun to watch in some cases for nostalgia fans, because they are designed to move exactly like the puppets in the Netflix series would move.

Spell attacks do not have super impressive animations. Usually it is a quick blue or purple glow animation that causes the opponent to stagger or fall.

The graphics of this game seem to be the main game feature the developers put the most attention into.

Each character has very detailed facial designs, and a unique costume that matches their current character class selection. The animated movements are the same for all of the gelflings, but they are quite charming.

Every time a skeksis appears in the game, things get much more interesting. The have awesomely detailed weapons, facial designs, and costume sets. They are oversized, which makes it even easier to scope around and look at them up close.

The camera controls offer a lot of latitude to circle around characters and foes, and zoom in and out. The terrain details were also vividly detailed, and felt like real movie scenes. I was particularly mesmerized by the ambiance of the realistic water effects.

However, many times the altitude changes became visually problematic because they hide characters from sight, or conceal squares, making it harder to select movement into some areas.

At times the graphical hardware stalled for a second or so, which is not ideal for nostalgic Dark Crystal fans who likely value immersion quite a bit.

Again, some of the best moments in the game occured any time a Skeksis appeared. All of them are designed with frightening realism, with dialog and facial portraits to make them look extra scary.

Even one of the elusive urRu's appears in the game. The famed Archer appears during an especially climatic moment.

The Chamberlain, attempts to befriend the gelfings, but he turns out being one of the most dangerous foes in the game.

After completing the game, there is a NewGame+ option. It has the same story as before, but you get to keep all of your characters, items, levels, and classes to face the game at a crazy difficulty level. The chamberlain was so powerful he insta-killed my most powerful character with over 1000 damage from a single hit.

I would say the game has some definite balance issues.

Things I Liked Best?

We get to face off against many of the skeksis. The General, The Chamberlain, the Emperor, the Scientist, and The Hunter. The Emperor has some incredibly powerful magic abilities that are beautifully animated, and it makes the final battle something dazzling to behold.

We get a whole ensemble of gelflings, podlings, and fizzgigs to utilize in battle. They all provide unique dialog throughout the story. I like having so many options to level up the characters into any classes I like. It is also fun to have gelflings from all of the main tribes, and each tribe gives the character special unique traits. This can make for some interesting strategy choices when deciding which classes and abilities will work best for certain key battles.

Another thing I appreciated is that even on the easy mode, victory in every battle was not guaranteed. Some of the battle missions have specific goals you have to accomplish before you run out of time. I remember one battle provided an especially hard challenge as I had to rescue various NPC's from being killed by foes.

Failure to win a battle is no major loss. The game does not penalize you by permanently killing your party members or forcing you to lose one-of-a-kind items. Instead, you can try again immediately, but you'll likely have to revise your strategy by adjusting your abilities, items, classes, party members, placement, and actions.

The game also features many interesting comic book style cut-scenes. The visual novel style generally is accompanied by generic music. I still appreciated them, because the artists put a lot of work into sketching these magical moments to give greater life and color the story characters.

Things I Liked Least?

Hate to say it, but the game trailer lied a bit about this game, and it was one of the main reasons I bought the game (I've embedded the game trailer at the end of this post). Unfortunately you do not get to play as Aughra in the game. In the trailer, she has the coolest voice, the best animated sprite, and the most powerful magic. So why didn't the developers include her in the game? She only appears briefly in some of the cut-scenes. This was a major disappointment for me.

Another notable omission was Lore. The stone creature was a prominent ally in the Netflix series. He never appears during the battles in this game, but he does appear in a cutscene. Same goes for The Heretic and The Wanderer.

There are a few rare moments when characters or foes are given a voice-over. It's usually a single sound effect when they get damaged or hurt. Without a full voice cast with the text conversation, I felt like it really hurt the nostalgia factor of this game. Aughra and the Chamberlain's voices alone could have made this game much more entertaining. The music was often a bit ho-hum as well. Most of the time I played this game with the sound off, not because it was annoying, but because I preferred to listen to whatever TV show I was watching while playing.

My last disappointment with this game was the selection of foes I spent most of the game grinding against. As with the Netflix series, which lacked Garthim, Crystal Bats, and Landstriders, the game did not include many monstrous opponents.

Once in a while I got to face off against the spider-like arathim creatures. If one of the little ones landed on your face, then you immediately became under the enemy's control. The only way to free your friend was to kill them! How unsettling!

But most of the time I was forced to battle against the worm-like nebrie, gelflings, and even podlings! In many ways this did not sit well with me. Why would the good guys in the game ever want to hurt the other good races of Thra? The gelfings generally despise violence, and it does not make a lot of sense for them to be attacking each other when the skeksis are the real enemies. More battles facing off against the skeksis would have made better sense, and be more fun and interesting.

How Do I Rate This Game?

Story: 9

It matches the story of the Netflix series almost perfectly. It also unfolds additional minor story elements by introducing new tribes and gelflings who did not appear in the series. I enjoyed learning more of their backstory. There was one particularly interesting side quest that led to the discovery of The Great Conjunction.

So many of the NPC's had such great dialog and story development. With 14 playable characters, I was constantly wishing some of these other NPC's were playable in battles. If this game was able to merge the entire Age of Resistance story into the game, I would have given it a perfect score.

Graphics: 8

Beautiful comic art-frames and stunningly rendered 3D models. The battles also featured incredibly detailed terrain textures such as swamps, mountains, and moving water physics.

In some instances the graphics would momentarily freeze up on me. The camera is fully controllable during battles, but you cannot move it during action sequences or during enemy turns. Certain terrains with cliffs and valleys, although realistic in design, make it overly complicated to view characters on their respective tiles. The designers were smart by making a translucent red outline around characters when they are concealed so they can be found, but I still thought it was annoying. Frequently I was wishing certain battles scenes did not include annoying palm trees that concealed my view.

Also the sprites were not as smoothly rendered as the ones in the game trailer. Some of the spell abilities were not as visually stunning as the trailer either. For instance, you cannot sling magic into the pillar and knock it onto a foe. So this is a bit of false advertising.

Gameplay: 6

The initial release of this game had some serious control problems. When scrolling up and down on the equipment menu or in the item shop, it would skip ahead regardless of pressure sensitivity. In a recent update, this issue has been fixed.

During battle a selection wheel appears around the character. Instead of spinning the wheel left to right, you have to aim the joystick at the exact angle to select the action you want to perform. On my player turns, I am constantly selecting the wrong action. This is a horrible control mechanism that makes the turns play a bit slow.

Selecting movement tiles is also a bit tricky, which is the case for most Strategy RPG's. It would have been nice if we could turn off elevation model textures with a button press, to make it easier to move behind legal spaces hidden behind rocks and trees.

Fun: 6

As expected, a lot of this game is a grind. Though I never skipped through dialog and cut-scenes. During these moments, I found myself putting my headphones back on in case there might be a special music track or voice-over. Often times it was just more bland fluff to fill in between the battles.

The game gives you the option to either play through the main campaign battles, or focus on leveling up your characters on repetitious grind battles. I like the fact that I can go back to my favorite locations to grind a bit, and the foes and starting locations will always be randomly generated, so it feels different each time I play.

Items and abilities were often less fun than I expected. They are all so generic. Equip the one that does the most damage, and that usually does the trick. There were so many items that quickly became useless once you can afford a better one. Items and abilities sometimes offer circumstantial effects. Trying to do something like berserk or poison an enemy before you can attack them with an ability that might miss is a major let down for me. These are just junk abilities in most cases.

I finished the entire game fairly quickly. In a typical week I can only play a handful of hours or so, and I beat the game in about a month. At least the game kept me interested from start to finish. The end game sequence was another bland cut-scene. At least it had the nicely drawn comic art again, but a bit underwhelming considering the graphical technology available for this game.

Overall Value: 7

Most players are regarding this as one of the better SRPG's on the market today. I think it has some rewarding value in blending the visual novel style in with the RPG game system. With such a rich story and world to use as the game canvas, it delivers well.

My biggest gripe is that there was no physical game cartridge released for this game. It was only available as a digital download. I guess Jim Henson's company doesn't want players to cash in on selling the game in the future when it grows in nostalgia value again. This is like throwing money down the drain.

I think this game is worth $25 to $35 at best. If it had full voice acting and included all of the heroes in the Netflix series as playable characters and villains, it would have been worth $60 easily. Other treasures such as the thematic music and fully rendered 3D cut-scenes would have also made this game much more valuable.

The cheap end-game sequence makes the whole game feel a bit like it was rushed out the door.

Still, I do not regret buying the game one bit, and might consider replaying it again someday.

Let me know if you found this review helpful. I know there are not a lot of authentic reviews for this game online. There aren't many great learning tutorials either. If you have any questions, I am happy to provide additional tips.

#screenshots #dark-crystal #ageofresistance #darkcrystal #gelflings #skeksis #podlings #fizzgig #game #nintendo #archdruid #rpg