Gloomhaven reviews1/27/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() What’s that story have to do with Gloomhaven? That’s kind of how the first mission felt but without the merciful ending. Long story short, once I swam to the water polo player I was supposed to save, he leapt out of the water, tackled me, and then proceeded to spend the next few minutes tossing me around the waterfront much to the amusement of everyone else watching before he got bored and let me save him. I was testing to be a lifeguard at a Boy Scout camp and the last drill was to save someone “drowning”. ![]() Starting out in Gloomhaven reminds me of a story from high school. Its straight-forward concept yet deep gameplay makes each of the 90+ scenarios a puzzle to solve. It’s a legacy game where you retire characters and unlock new ones based on a life goal. It’s a thematic dungeon crawler that has broad appeal to both Euro and ameritrash gamers. It was, until I started writing this review, the number one game on Board Game Geek (you’re welcome Brass!). Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is out now on Steam.Gloomhaven is many things to the board game community. Developer Flaming Fowl and publisher Asmodee Digital have shown that DLC doesn’t need to be a dirty word, that you don’t need to rely on predatory micro-transactions to monetise your game, and that an expansion can offer real value to your fanbase without taking advantage of them, and that should always be welcomed and supported. READ MORE: Enter The Void (2009) – Limited Edition Blu-ray ReviewĪll in all, Jaws of the Lion is a solid expansion to a game that already offers potentially hundreds of hours of play. My recommendation for anyone thinking about buying this would be to hold off till you’ve completed the base game, or at the very least don’t enable the DLC till you’re really comfortable with Gloomhaven‘s mechanics. The tutorial levels also don’t include the new mercenaries, so this leaves new players unfamiliar with the board game facing a steep learning curve. The DLC release would have been a good opportunity to make these more new-player-friendly but sadly that’s a missed opportunity. When there are literally dozens of Reddit threads and Youtube videos dedicated to explaining how to beat your game’s tutorial levels, then in my opinion you’ve failed at making a good tutorial. As a digital translation of a board game, Gloomhaven looks just fine.ĭoes Jaws of the Lion do anything to make Gloomhaven any more accessible to new players? Unfortunately, no, and that’s a shame. Does Jaws of the Lion add anything new in terms of presentation? No, but that’s not a bad thing. So is it any good? If you want more Gloomhaven, then yes! It’s more Gloomhaven, and adding in the new mercenaries right from the start means you can play through the original campaign in all new ways. The new features of the DLC are mixed in with main game from the get-go, with the new expansion missions showing up pretty early on in the campaign, and the new mercenaries available to be recruited right at the start of any new campaign. Unlike many other expansions, this is not a standalone experience. It’s fair to say it’s a decently meaty expansion, compared to some of the bare-bones Triple-A offerings we’re used to seeing. With Jaws of the Lion you get four new mercenaries, ten new enemy types, 25 new scenarios, new random encounters and new items so you’re easily looking at another 30+ hours of content here, with each Gloomhaven scenario easily taking 40+ minutes to complete depending on how experienced you are with the game mechanics and strategies. On release, Gloomhaven offered 17 mercenaries for you to play with, with six starting classes and two campaigns that could easily take you over a hundred+ hours to complete, so it was hardly lacking in content. We’re here to take a look at its newly released DLC, again based on an expansion for the board game – Jaws of the Lion (currently available on Steam for a very reasonable £13.99). I will state up front that I found my time with Gloomhaven to be… frustrating, but that’s by the by as we’re not here to discuss the base game. While ostensibly appearing to be a game based around recruiting mercenaries to go dungeon-crawling, Gloomhaven is actually a brutally unforgiving resource management puzzle game in disguise, and for a lot of folks, that’s their jam. For me, this game is proof that a conversion from tabletop to video game can be a little too faithful. Gloomhaven, both in its original board game form and in PC game form, has a dedicated and loyal fanbase.
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