The narrative of this title plays as an extremely abridged version of the Netflix show’s multiple-episode saga, condensing whole episodes or batches of plot points into a single mission or narrative nod to speed up the actual conflict and dodge the political play of the early moments of the tale. Though the score never rises to the same levels as the theme they’ve borrowed, the audio package is well balanced overall. A genuinely good job has been done here, and the sound effects do serve to heighten rather than distract from the experience. Though the game employs original music inside battles, this has been successfully written to tonally match both the feel of the show’s score and the environments in which each conflict takes place. It’s a fantastic orchestral piece that shifts seamlessly from the main menu to the loading screen and into the world map that acts as the player’s hub, serving to smooth over the loading periods between missions. Making use of the show’s epic title theme makes loading up Age of Resistance Tactics feel weighty and grand. These mar an otherwise attractive package, and serve to give the game a ‘made for mobile’ feel that belays the console release of the end product. Surrounding this are some truly horrible hand drawn cutscenes that play out as animatic stills in a comic book style and provide utter tonal clash with the rest of the game, and even the painterly style of the 2D world map you explore one waypoint at a time. Renderings of environments, though structured on a grid based format, also reflect the distinctive look and feel of the carefully designed world that Henson and Froud worked so hard to create. In-game graphics are beautifully rendered 3D models of characters and locations from the show, taking the meticulously crafted puppets and turning them into animatics on screen with great success. Developed by En Masse Entertainment for simultaneous release across multiple platforms, they have a pre-existing partnership with Netflix after releasing the Season 3 Stranger Things game, and have previous work on Tera, an MMORPG. In the case of Tactics, this is the new series. It should be noted that Sierra’s original game is still kept online and playable through the official Dark Crystal home page to this day and is well work a look for those who may have missed this hidden gem (available HERE), and it shares similar themes with the newly released title in that it essentially works as a light re-treading of the same narrative as its namesake.
#THE DARK CRYSTAL AGE OF RESISTANCE TACTICS STEAM SERIES#
Though it’s always been a cult classic, a recent resurgence in interest led by a series of young adult novels and comics cumulated in Netflix commissioning a prequel series subtitled ‘Age of Resistance’ that also came with its own Tactics RPG tie-in. Aside from a single adventure game release in 1982 by Sierra, the unique world setting of Jim Henson’s film ‘The Dark Crystal’ has been curiously unexplored in video game form.
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