We recently finished our first Descent Road to Legend campaign and I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the campaign as whole.
We played the Rise of all Goblins campaign which consists of two preset missions and 3 campaign weeks which can be spent shopping in town or going on side quest. So we ended up playing 4 total quests using 2 heroes.
Let's talk about the two player mode first. Descent is built for 4 players but has rules to allow for fewer, however if you do play with less you will not have access to all of the archetypes. Certainly a warrior and a healer seem necessary for any party but without a scout you're going to struggle with traps and searches and the lack of a mage will likely mean you're going to fail a lot of willpower and knowledge tests.
Playing two player means you'll face fewer monsters but you'll also have fewer activations and be only physically able to cover two areas of the board at any given time. As compensation for the lack of actions the game grants a player in a two player party an additional action that can be used as an attack or to heal two damage. While this helps compensate for your missing companions it really doesn't replace a dedicated healer or warrior.
The Rise of all Goblins campaign is quite short, you'll unlock 3 xp worth of abilities so you won't see your hero reach its full potential over the course of the campaign and you'll only really have a single opportunity to go shopping to upgrade your starting equipment. That said I think that the campaign length is good for a tutorial and for groups with less time to commit to the game. We finished the campaign in two sittings and you could easily finish it in a single day of dedicated gaming.
The missions themselves all had a good variety of tasks. The first and last mission of the campaign are fixed, while the side missions are pulled from your collection of content based on the physical products you own. This makes the campaign fairly replayable as even if you end up playing the same missions again you will be presented with different foes assuming you have access to a few expansions.
The missions themselves are also pretty short in comparison to other dungeon crawlers and even compared to Descent's own analogue version. Once you work out how the AI handles things turns go pretty quickly and there's very little down time in a two player game, you're involved all the time.
Having played both Road to Legend and Legends of the Alliance I have to say I like Road to Legend a little better. I think RTL feels cleaner and it feels more thematic. In LotA we had odd moments where a famous villain would be completely out of place, like Boba Fett guarding an Imperial bunker or a nexu acting as a prison guard. While in Descent the various creatures are all of a fantasy bent and so generally all make sense. That said I guess it's just as possible for the app to make weird randomised choices in either setting especially if you own all the content.
With regards to the heroes I also find the Descent ones simpler. I would be reticent to play two Imperial Assault heroes simultaneously as there is so much going on with each one, while with Road to Legend I think were we to play again I would recommend playing two heroes each so that we had a full complement of archetypes.
Overall then I liked it and it's probably the way I would like to play Descent in the future as it means I get to actually play as a hero and the app worries about doing all the upkeep instead of me. What I will say is that I'd like to see a scoring system implemented into the app, currently the campaign is win or lose based on the out come of the final mission, whereas a score based on your progress through the campaign would give you a sense of achievement even if you lost.
Btw… we lost!
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