Every character has a basic attack, but the other actions will take magic points and can be used to help allies or hinder enemies. On your turn, you can move characters and then have them take one of several actions, depending on what skills they have. Once the battle begins, the action follows a turn order located at the top of the screen. Each battle has some prerequisites, such as specific characters you have to use and where they start, or certain win conditions, but you can usually add a few characters of your own choosing. Battles begin with you assigning characters to start on designated tiles. This is a small game and while there are some customizable options, it still feels quite simple. Navigating the menus and maps feels a little clumsy with a controller, but it's never a problem because the mechanics are pretty limited. So you have to hope for a solid strategy RPG, and this is only passable. There's no charm, no creativity, just the barebones effort to officially tie this to the series. So when Age of Resistance is hitting the same plot points but without the aesthetic around them, it can't help but feel like something is missing. ![]() The Dark Crystal is really something that's more about visuals than story. The beats are all here, but the Netflix series is far better because the charm of the puppets and the technical acumen demonstrated in the direction. It's a little baffling as Age of Resistance Tactics is likely designed to appeal to fans of the show, so it's unclear why the game is just retelling the same story, but worse. The narrative is a little ad-hoc, pulling from specific moments, like Rian's escape from the castle or Brea's Podling cleaning, jumping around a bit more and telling things out of order. It would be worth indulging if you were simply looking for more stories in the world of the Dark Crystal, but the game is just covering much of the same material the show did. ![]() There are just a lot of largely repurposed names and phrases, shoe-horned into a strategy RPG - and a mediocre one. The settings aren't crafted with the visual flair of the series. The animation doesn't have the weird, surreal puppetry as the characters move. There's nothing in Age of Resistance Tactics that feels quintessentially "Dark Crystal". They were platformers and beat ‘em ups not because it lent itself to the source material, but because it was easiest to churn out a game of that kind. These games weren't always capital "B" bad, as history has made them out to be, but they were relatively generic. That's what The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics feels like, one of those old games that kids were supposed to see after watching Batman Returns, recognize the heroes, take it home and then realize that they actually just bought a bog-standard action game that was coated in a layer of branding. There are so many anecdotal "classic" examples of the licensed game, it's almost impossible to just pick one, but some standouts include DuckTales, The Lion King, and Aladdin. ![]() Are licensed video games ever coming back? For those of you who are too young to remember, video games were seen as little more than toys back in the '90s (I'm old) and therefore, much in the same way there'd be a line of action figures and fast-food tie-ins for Jurassic Park, Independence Day, or Beetlejuice, there would be a video game.
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