Imperial Assault is FFG's newest doom clone, this time set in Star Wars. Team Covenant streamed a session of it last night. And from what i saw it. it really is Descent 2.0...but with Star Wars!!
I have 2 issues with Descent. Mostly from the first edition. In the original edition, the heroes were extremely powerful. Unless you had a totally ruthless cunning overlord, the heroes were always going to stomp all over the scenarios. Nowhere was this more apparent in the Road to Legend campaign system, where if the overlord wanted any hope of winning the campaign he had to do it in the first few rounds, more or less invalidating the months that the campaign should take. I think they may have fixed this in Descent 2, I don;t know. I've not played a proper game of descent 2 because of b)
And there came a problem with players. Most see the overlord as a GM, there to run the game and shepherd the players through the scenario. When it's really not, it's very much us v them.
My experience with Descent has been locally where the GM issue has more less ruined it. The player in question just turned into Pathfinder-lite. Ignored most Overlord mechanics, made death more or less pointless. If I wanted to played Pathfinder-lite I would probably play Pathfinder, which I don't.
All in all, I just can't be excited about Imperial Assault based on past experience. I don't know enough about Descent 2.0 and Imperial Assault to know any differences. I suppose it has skirmish mode, but I'm not keen on forking out cash for 50% of a game
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I'm not a big fan of Descent. For me when played properly it is just too bloody difficult and then I lose interest. Games should be a challenge but not stupidly OTT. I think that's why locally the GM alters things slightly to make the game more enjoyable. Even so, it's not a game I enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI think it may have the same issue as I have with Firefly.
DeleteI really REALLY REALLY WANT to like it, but I can't. Firefly is too long and boring, Descent has been made boring by house rules. And so I'm just left with feelings of disappointment,.
Firefly doesn't do it for me for the same reason. I like some games that run on (Arkham Horror for instance) but Firefly just gets boring as it goes along. There is no sense of struggle as the game goes along.
DeleteI also don't like the mechanic that says if you have an encounter and successfully resolve it that you have stop thus wasting fuel and cash. The encounter deck routinely hit me with stop and search while trying to play legal jobs and screwed me over.