Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest

Druidstone was a very enjoyable experience, combining the best of board games like descent: journeys into the dark and similar objective-based dungeon crawlers together with solid tactical combat. The gameplay has quite a bit of depth to it and each scenario is unique and asks you to rethink how to approach the game. The game world itself is lush, colourful and breathes life without getting in the way of the actual game. The characters aren't remarkable outside of the warden, but even so they each have a well-defined character and work well with this game's light story. This game really caters to just having a good time. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but that is not to say it doesn't have its serious moments, either. The game as a whole is very balanced that way. The tactical gameplay itself is easy to learn, difficult to do well but not frustrating. It just offers a good challenge, which you can further customize as you see fit. If you are looking for a strategy game that offers depth, and provides its contents to you in bite-sized chunks, I recommend playing this lovely game.

A lot has already been said in other reviews on the strategic gameplay, which doesn't rely on unlockables and RNG to artificially stretch the length of the game like so many do these days. It also features a lot of content, a high level of difficulty and one can replay missions to do optional objectives and through that potentially unlock more skills. (Some optional objectives provide only gold) So that's all wonderful. But the writing. It's as if someone on the team has a cousin in high school who got involved in some shady dealings and to try and save them from a life of crime, they tried to encourage them by letting them write the dialogue for this game. Just one example: At some point, a Japanese character is introduced and what they say is written in romaji. It is so bad that I started skipping most dialogues very after about just two missions. Here and there, I get a bit curious about what's going on and always regret it. As a sidenote, the visual style is obviously lacking all over the place (low detail 3D graphics and somewhat tacky looking character portraits) but that, I find forgivable. It is really only the writing that prevents me from fully enjoying Druidstone.

I really enjoyed all parts of the game. The battles remined me of Blackguard, they are turn-based, but involve more than just taking turns attacking each other. There are environment objects you can interact with, bonus objectives that you can achieve for additional rewards, sometimes you need to protect someone, sometimes you need to escape to exit. Some missions are also just puzzles you have to solve. The couple complaints I have is it was very short, I completed everything in like 19 hours, and I really do not see any replayability. There is not really anything I can do differently if I start over a second time.

Even the first mission requires a bit of thinking if you want to complete all mission objectives even on normal difficulty, I like that. The story is crap and might as well skip all dialogue, but despite what others say, I see the RPG element in it, which is the character progression. You level up, you choose abilities (though sadly from a random set of abilities each time) and you buy (or sell) and equip items. Game gives endless retries for missions and you can even replay missions later when you're stronger if you failed to complete all the optional objectives previously.

Also, it feels more like playing chess, moving pieces across the board and planning moves in advance. Very little freedom in this game.