This weekend my long suffering gaming buddy and I decided to go dungeon delving. I’ve owned Descent 2nd Edition since release but have always found it tricky to get to the table, or at least to get a campaign to completion. The problem always seemed to be that as the campaign progressed the victors were awarded with additional power while the loser stayed roughly the same. This asymmetrical progression is not uncommon in campaign games but once the writing is on the wall it becomes harder to get a group enthused about playing again.
Enter Road to Legend. Here we have a fully co-op Descent experience, all of us human players against the machine. So Dave and I broke out our heroes and took the game for a spin.
Road to Legend is an app driven experience. Each campaign starts and ends with preset missions, with the other games being drawn from a pool of random side missions based on the expansions and additional content you own for the game, meaning each time you play the game will offer different choices. We decided to play the Rise of all Goblins campaign, which is a short tutorial style campaign played over 6 “weeks”.
Weeks are an in game term for rounds. Each week you can undertake a mission, go shopping, rest or train. Undertaking missions will increase your gold reserves and increase your fame, which will affect what items appear in the shop. The more famous you become the better your selection of items.
We chose our heroes, Dave plumped for a drunken dwarven knight called Grisban the Thirsty. Hoping to compensate for Grisban’s uncoordinated nature and lack of any apparent ability to comprehend the written word, I went for Leoric of the Book. When choosing a hero you can pick from among four main archetypes, Warrior, Healer, Scout and Mage, however you may then choose a specific class from those you have available to you. I chose the Runemaster, a powerful spell user, while Dave picked the Knight class, an honorable defender.
And with that we set off on our very first mission. The app walks you through a tutorial mission which predetermines a lot of your actions, some of which are not great. For example after knocking out one of your heroes the app has you open a door and activate a bunch of monsters instead of allowing you time to heal up and prevent your heroes getting smacked upside the head.
The other problem with the tutorial is that you can accidentally miss some of the instructions by killing monsters before they have time to activate and demonstrate the various abilities the app was going to show you. Regardless the tutorial is okay but I still recommend printing the rulebook and having it on hand to look up just how to handle situations that will arise.
Having played Legends of the Alliance previously I was pleasantly surprised with Road to Legend at just how quickly it plays. We bashed out 3 full missions in under 5 hours and managed to stop for pizza and wings (and Cheesecake!). The tutorial is mostly a bash ‘em up style mission, teaching you the basics of combat with a small amount of exploration. However the other two missions each played differently. The second mission was an escort mission while mission 3 had us tracking a dragon and jumping from mini map to mini map. Each one offered a challenge but played quickly and I had a really good time with it. I was disappointed that the side missions did not reward us with any xp to allow us to level up our characters between missions though.
Next time we will take on the finale and I’m psyched to do it!