![]() ![]() 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. ![]() If you love strategy and tactics and are thinking about buying, go watch one of the 3 hour YouTube walkthroughs of a single tiny scenario, where one turn sometimes takes 15 minutes just to decide which cards to burn, and imagine if that's how you want to spend 3 hours.Gloomhaven, both in its original board game form and in PC game form, has a dedicated and loyal fanbase. Without any of the satisfaction that other tactical fighters deliver. Even if you are victorious, it feels like a job. The end result is that it can take two hours to complete a tiny fight in 2 rooms. Exhaustion (which is when you run out of cards) could have instead been a resource that you spend on moves, like energy. I get the need to create tension and pressure but the system chosen here reduces fun an increased tedium. which has a significant chance to be a 1 or 0 due to combat rolls), do on top of being weak are also scarce. The abilities are already weak (like attack at range for 2 damage. The core culprit is the card burn system which means you run out of actions over time. Gloomhaven takes the tactical rpg template and adds layer upon layer of annoying, contrived mechanics in order to create difficulty but which just reduce the fun factor instead. For context I'm a huge strategy, tactics and rpg nerd having sunk thousands of hours into these formats since 1990. ![]() ![]()
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