Sep's Take - Game Reviews

[Seperallis]

You knew this was going to be the very first thing I talked about.


Title: Armello
Developer: League of Geeks
Publisher: League of Geeks
Release: Sept 2015
Genre: Virtual RPG Board Game
Price: $19.99 (+DLC)


The TLDR:
There aren’t too many more ways I can picture where you can be mean to your friends and still get to call them friends at the end of the day. Anyone who knows me already knows this is one of my favorite games by how many times I bug them to come online and play it with me.

The Review:
Armello is a virtual board game whereby players move virtual character tokens across a semi-randomly arranged game board collecting the items and power necessary to become the next ruler of Armello, while doing their darndest to prevent their opponents from doing the same. The premise is simple: the king of Armello is stricken by an ancient evil and is dying, and so your goal is to either hasten his demise and take the throne for yourself, or position yourself so your renown sees you crowned as the next king when he dies.

The game’s mechanics are easy enough to learn, as you and three opponents take turns moving, collecting items and followers to help you. Players roll dice to resolve challenges between both other players and the board itself, with the amount of dice available to you determined mainly by the type of challenge and your selected character’s specific attributes, which can be improved by selecting and completing a small number of “quest” challenges. While this all might sound tedious and time consuming to follow, the fact that it’s a virtual board game means all the tedium of shuffling cards, calculating dice rolls, tabulating statistics, and keeping track of rules and turns is done by the computer, ensuring that players can focus more attention on the important task of winning.

The game itself is colorfully rendered in 3D isometric view, with challenges moving into a 2D adversarial pane. Character tokens are fully animated in both 2D and 3D, with portraits similar in style to the best of mid-90’s western anthropomorphic animation and uniquely quirky to each character’s personality.

Oh, did I forget to mention that you’re all anthropomorphic animals killing each other for power and prestige? Because you’re all anthropomorphic animals killing each other for power and prestige.

Armello’s aesthetic is just so well put together that I can’t find any fault in it: daytime is a feast of colors - especially with the Seasons DLC that gives the board a random new look every game, based on the seasons - and the muted purples of night reminds players of the Rot streaming under the surface and slipping up through the cracks in the bright daytime veneer. The music is lovely, a fitting orchestral arrangement that evolves from cheery to brooding to triumphant and more as situations dictate, but is always the right mood at the right time.

If you’re a lover of collecting tat, then Armello is a dream. Regardless of win or loss, completing games awards “chests,” which almost always contain a random style of dice skin from a collection du jour that occasionally changes. Aside from downloadable hero reskins, these dice are your means for customization within the game, and there are just tons of them, each with unique styles, effects, and even sounds.

The game’s mechanics and characters are all well thought and varied. As a virtual board game, Armello is able to seriously cut down on the tedium that comes with physical board games while implementing some mechanics (such as stealth) that are either impossible or clunky in a physical medium, and doing so with flashy lights and animations that you don’t get with little solid pawns. As with anything involving “dice” or “cards,” winning or losing can come down quite literally to the luck of the draw, and while good players will more often win by minimizing risk and making their own luck, I must mention that even exceptional games can (and will) end in defeat from one unlucky roll of the dice.

The characters are each unique in their abilities and appearances, and there are enough of them to keep gameplay fresh over many play sessions. While the game ships with 8 characters, the paid DLC can bolster that number up to 20, each with unique styles and considerations of play. Playing with your friends in a private lobby shares all your accumulated DLC (except for character reskins), which is nice, but even without them the 8 basic heroes are different enough to remain enjoyable, and balanced enough to remain competitive even though several of the DLC characters are just objectively easier to play.

Speaking of balance, the game is constantly updated at time of writing as the development team at League of Geeks prepares it for the “Version 2.0” update. While I’m not a fan of all the changes (I will forever miss Ghor, my beautiful broken baby boy), edits to several cards and characters over the last year have resolved issues of certain characters and card combinations being absolutely overpowered and impossible to handle while preserving their flavor, making for a much more overall fair game than it used to be.

Unfortunately, all the constant updates mean that something, somewhere eventually and frequently breaks...and in a worryingly high number of cases, broken in ways that you know should have been obvious during any kind of normal QA testing. While problems do get resolved eventually, that “eventually” can take a ridiculously unacceptable amount of time to happen, such as one glitch in particular that handicapped players by making part of your hand of cards unplayable duds; sure it’s fixed now, but it took months - MONTHS - to resolve. For all that balancing as well, there are certain characters whose abilities are just objectively mediocre, situational, or worse, boring (here’s looking at you, Mercurio), compared to some other much more active, interesting, or outright more useful abilities that will have a much more consistent and direct impact upon the game.

All that said, the only really heavy criticism of Armello I have boils down to the tutorial, and the price tag:

As it is, the “tutorial” is barely there, a four chapter mini-campaign through the background plot showcasing a headlining hero from each of the four clans that runs disjointedly prods at the basics of play and can take some 30-60 minutes to complete, give or take. Completing the tutorial gives some shiny dice, so the time spent isn’t a wash, but you’ll find that just getting into your first game will teach you much more about how to actually play.

As for the price, it’s...okay? At $20-ish, it seems much cheaper than a physical board game of a similar scale, but then I remember that’s the price of admission for just one person. There is no local multiplayer option (not that one could exist), meaning a family of four playing together will shell out $80, an additional $30 for all the additional characters, and four separate computers on which to play; for one family board game, this is a steep price.

A couple last nits to pick before I go: the forced camera panning between turns can get rather annoying when you don’t care about what’s happening and are trying to play cards out of turn, especially when playing via a controller. Also, low-end computers can take quite some time to load the character selection screen, during which the timer counting to the beginning of the match will continue and can put players at a significant early (and sometimes persistent) disadvantage.

The Takeaway:
Overall, Armello is a fantastic board game that marries itself with just the right amount of traditional roleplaying elements to keep me hooked for 100 games, and enough lost evenings on the horizon for 100 more. Whether or not it’s your jam, the aesthetic is superb, and I’ve had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat (and vice versa) enough times to make every game tense and exciting as they near an end, regardless of how secure any lead might seem.

If you’re a board game enthusiast, the basic $20 asking price will get you plenty of enjoyment, but I would wait for a sale to snag any extra DLC. If you can get it all on sale, grab it: grab it for yourself, your friends, your family, your creepy neighbor and your cat.

This is one of my favorite games in my library, and if I have to give it a score, it comes up with a solid 8 dice out of 10.

“When I’m king, you’ll all be hung.” ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°