izigame.me

This game can be brilliant at times, but it's also a constant rollercoaster of frustration.
1: Difficulty is Nonsense
The difficulty curve of Gloomhaven is literally, by far, the worst I've experienced in any game ever. As you learn the basic rules, you will start out getting absolutely slammed by every scenario even on Easy and everything will feel completely unfair. As you learn to play your cards correctly and your characters unlock perks, cards, gear, and enchantments, you will start to get noticeably more powerful, and will probably bump to Normal or even Hard. And then, just when the "flow" state really sets in and you're enjoying the clever tactics and synergy of your party, your characters start retiring. And you don't get a choice about this - if your Personal Quest is complete, that mercenary is deleted.
The ruleset *claims* that this is a victory - you've unlocked a new character! And they will even start with a bonus perk! Unfortunately, without all those levels, items, and perks (not to mention having to learn one or more new characters), the game is suddenly stupidly hard again. You see, even though monsters "scale" to your level, they don't scale anywhere near enough. Normal for Party Level 1 (0 gold) and Normal for Party Level 5 (400+ gold in items and enchants) are radically different difficulties, and you will be forced to repeatedly retire and reset back down to sh*tty new characters frequently in your campaign.
2: Events Are Total BS
Most Road and City events in this game are a binary choice between A and B, and you don't get information on what clicking either button will actually do. Despite this, some of them carry SEVERE negatives like losing 10s of gold, losing checkmarks (3 checkmarks unlock a perk, so losing checkmarks is the worst feeling in the world. imagine if you could lose talent points in WoW just for clicking the wrong dialogue option in a quest), or harsh penalties at the start of your next scenario (remember the difficulty rant above? well what if you randomly started combat with 3 damage and Poison on all your characters too).
And it would be more understandable if events were generally positive, with some risk involved - you'd feel mostly rewarded, with the occasional bad beat. Or if they consistently presented you with clues as to how to approach them. But no - roughly 20% of the time, both A and B choices are negative, and 60% of the time one does nothing / one is negative. And sometimes the designers punish you for being safe, while sometimes they punish you for being bold. There's even several pairs of events with text that is IDENTICAL, except for a single word (e.g. "red" vs "white") that flips the outcome. Overall, this event system was probably meant to be "immersive", but it really just feels crushing and unfun. The constant risk of a terrible outcome encourages players to google spoilers for every event so they don't get screwed by a coin flip.
3: Balance and Gameplay Design
For how beloved this game, a lot of the balance and design in it is honestly.... iffy. For example, as you play the campaign, you frequently loot new items - some are even Rare, and are limited to just 1 in your party. And almost all of them are worse than the 10-30g starting items you get in the first 20% of the game. There is never any reason not to vendor 90% of the cool "loot" you find and just spend it on enchantments instead.
Classes are in a similar boat - there are very clear S-tier and D-tier choices here, and depending on what you unlock, you may just get stuck in a loop of remaking the same class you just retired.
Enemy ability decks have some wildly OP things in them (e.g. an Initiative 5 card that will go before 99% of characters and make that monster virtually invulnerable for the round), which can make some combat turns feel more like rock-paper-scissors than an interesting tactics game.
On the character side, there is also lots and LOTS of cheese, and the most powerful strategies are all about how much you can cheese and exploit the broken mechanics. Go invisible in every door, find a broken card and Stamina Pot it back 3 times, instakills, mind control, etc. Sometimes the scenarios feel like a satisfying puzzle, or you get use fun synergies and combos. Other times you just find a gimmick and abuse it over and over.
4: Digital Problems
Gloomhaven was a board game first. The digital game is a huge convenience for automating the monster behaviour and not requiring 30 minutes of fiddling with tokens just to set up a scenario. The digital game is also a clusterf*ck of bad UI and half-finished implementations that will require you to keep a PDF of the rulebook open on your 2nd monitor if you actually want to play the game.
Some especially bad offenders here:
- The game doesn't show you the map or any of the special scenario rules in the screen where you choose cards and battle goals. This is a TACTICS game, meaning your loadout is extremely dependent on the scenario goals and parameters - for example, you may need lots of healing to keep allied NPCs alive, you may need to disarm traps (or push enemies into them), you may need lots of burst AoE damage, or pure single-target. In the board game this is all open information before you start. In the video game, you need to consult an out-of-game PDF or do a clunky Start - Abandon - Back to Map - Travel sequence to redo the whole thing. This is not a one-off, but a *frequent* issue that comes up in almost every scenario.
- Sometimes the combat UI shows you Personal Quests, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it shows you Battle Goals, sometimes it doesn't. It's all over the place.
- Certain UI prompts will lock you out of panning or zooming the camera, so you can't see what's going on in another part of the battlefield.
- Certain UI prompts will lock you out of seeing the items or cards available on your characters.
- A lot of items are quite buggy, and the UI can simply break if you press items or elements in the wrong order.
- The Restart Round button only works on your turn, so if you misclicked something on an enemy's turn, you may have completely f*cked the battle.
- Even after you enter combat, a lot of scenario rules, especially with regards to spawning monsters or upcoming events, are simply not explained at all. In the board game, if a monster spawns at hex F in Round 9, this is open information. If a boss teleports between hexes A-B-C-D, this is open information. In the digital game, it may not tell you why, how, or when things happen at all in a number of scenarios. This is actually where I got so tilted that I decided to write this review - the endgame Dark Rider boss fight was so poorly explained that I had to spend an hour googling its AI, rules, and strategy.
- The Solo Scenarios DLC also seems like it was rushed and has a number of issues - see the negative reviews on that page.
In summary, Gloomhaven has some brilliant ideas and one of the most clever and fascinating card rulesets of all time. It is also extremely, extremely frustrating to play, and keeps finding new ways to disappoint and infuriate you even 75 hours into your playthrough.