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Star Wars: Imperial Assault Review
- Matt Thrower
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- Shiny Balls
- Number Of Fence
The first edition of Warhammer 40k was perhaps the worst thing Games Workshop even made. Although it was stuffed full of interesting tidbits, they unwisely chose to just copy their fantasy battle system into the 41st millennium. Where, as a result, a crossbow had the exact same stat line as a bolt gun, planting a high-explosive round smack into the middle of your suspension of disbelief. Porting fantasy straight to sci-fi is rarely a good idea.
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BUT ... too many of the campaign scenarios are so carefully tuned that the heroes will fail if they spend any time at all trading shots with the baddies. My fellow Rebel player and I got our clocks cleaned in a couple of scenarios early on, and finally realized what the designers want us to do:
1. At the beginning of the scenario you need to count how many spaces away the objectives are from your starting area and figure out how many actions that will take you to get there. Then add in a certain number of actions for dealing with suddenly-closing doors, slicing consoles, etc. Take that action total and subtract it from the total number of actions that the time limit of the scenario will allow for. That is how many actions at best that you can use for healing and fighting. You need to figure this out in advance or else you will be late to the objective and lose. Unfortunately this is not fun. I never want to treat this type of run-and-gun, shoot-some-stormtroopers ameritrash game so clinically.
2. Rebel players need to ignore enemies as much as possible. If it's a choice between a move-and-attack or a double-move then the objective probably requires the latter. This means that many scenarios boil down to the Imperial player getting to take lots of shots at the heroes with his evergreen supply of troops while the heroes just move and/or heal their wounds. This must be a lot of fun for the Imperial player but it is not fun as a Rebel player. I want to achieve objectives, sure, but I also want to mix it up a bit.
3. Hope the Imperial player makes mistakes, at least on the first time through a campaign. Many scenarios involve plot twists and unforeseeable complications for the heroes. After a while you sort of get used to that as a Rebel player, but you just can't always predict what the twist will be. If your Imperial player is ruthless then they can use their knowledge advantage to crush you in certain scenarios. This is where a game publisher's QA process can really make or break a game, especially whether they use blind playtesting or not. This game feels like one where they had the same playtesters for the entire QA phase. The game itself is admirably tuned, but I get the strong sense that a number of the campaign missions were more evenly balanced for FFG's veteran playtesters than they are for new Rebel players.
I will say that the rich-get-richer aspect to it is not too brutal. We're nearing the end of the campaign and the Rebels are having problems, but if we can win that last mission then we'll win the campaign! The Imperial player has gotten some great upgrades, but so have we. And speaking of the campaign, I really like how it's structured. Certain missions are mandatory, but some are essentially chosen by the Rebels and some by the Imperial. Pretty neat.
We have yet to play a skirmish, but it sounds like that's the mode that will satisfy my desire to just blow some stuff up. In the meantime we're having a blast with the campaign and are looking forward to the expansions and even another main campaign play-through. It's a fun game, and since none of us has played Descent it's all new to us!
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#3 This is very correct. While there seems plenty of dice rolling and randomness, it's actually a very skill-dependent, resource management game.
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- ChristopherMD
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- southernman
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We have decided to give it a miss, plenty of other games for us to get into.
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Overall, I don't think I'd get it. I think it plays best with 4 Rebel characters despite what they claim about it being balanced with lower counts. That means you need 5 people to play it every time and that's not always easy to do.
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- ChristopherMD
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- hotseatgames
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Varys wrote: Overall, I don't think I'd get it. I think it plays best with 4 Rebel characters despite what they claim about it being balanced with lower counts. That means you need 5 people to play it every time and that's not always easy to do.
Not quite true. There is nothing stopping you from controlling 4 characters by yourself. That's what I did on all my Descent & IA playthroughs. And getting 2 people together to finish a campaign is infinitely easier than if it was with more people.
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- san il defanso
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I'm a lousy Imperial player too, because we're five missions into our campaign and I've only won the most recent one. This is against two rebel players.
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- Michael Barnes
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Sevej wrote:
Varys wrote: Overall, I don't think I'd get it. I think it plays best with 4 Rebel characters despite what they claim about it being balanced with lower counts. That means you need 5 people to play it every time and that's not always easy to do.
Not quite true. There is nothing stopping you from controlling 4 characters by yourself. That's what I did on all my Descent & IA playthroughs. And getting 2 people together to finish a campaign is infinitely easier than if it was with more people.
I've played it exclusively with three players, two Rebel players handling two characters each, and it's worked just fine.
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