GAMING REVIEWS
High-performance playtime
I love strategy games. I love The Dark Crystal. But heading into this adaptation of the Netflix TV series, I was pretty sceptical of the idea of squishing the two together. It’s a pleasure to report that while Age of Resistance: Tactics never fully justifies the combo, it’s a far richer and more substantial game than you might expect.
For those unfamiliar, the show (itself spun out from a 1982 cult movie) takes place in a strange fantasy world, represented primarily through puppetry and animatronics, where the peaceful Gelflings are oppressed by the parasitic Skeksis. The game loosely retells this story, with a few new diversions, though in a way jumbled and fleeting enough that anyone who hasn’t watched the series will be utterly lost. With too little explanation for the uninitiated, and not enough new elements to please fans
“It’s a far richer and more substantial game than you might expect. ”
looking for significant additions to the canon, the storytelling falls flat. But where the game shines is in its action. As you progress across the campaign map, you put together parties of heroes – from a stuffed roster of characters from the show and new additions – to fight in turn-based battles. Thanks to clear presentation and a generous undo button, the strategy is pleasingly accessible, while still boasting plenty of depth to sustain its surprisingly chunky 20-hour runtime.
Stages get cleverer and more elaborate as you go, showing off a real flair for strategy design. On coastal islands you have to keep an eye on the tide, which may rise to drown hapless fighters, or lower to expose new routes; in the dungeons of the Skeksis, your party is at one point divided along two routes, each having to find and hit levers that open doors for the other; and in the Grottan caves, a stage challenges you to line up boulders and whack them into burrows to stem a tide of beasts, like a giant game of Gelfling snooker.
While the strategy combat is good fun throughout, its relationship to the source material is variable to say the least. A fight against the Chamberlain evokes the show nicely, as he uses honeyed words to confuse your heroes. But representing Brea’s search for knowledge as a skirmish against a squad of librarians is awkward at best. Enjoyable as the battles can be, it was rare for an hour to go by without something in the game reminding me that this isn’t the ideal genre for a Dark Crystal adaptation.
It’s not going to rock anyone’s world, but for a cheap TV tie-in it’s a lot more engaging than it has any right to be, serving as a pleasant opportunity for series fans to spend a few more hours in the company of their favourite Gelflings.