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The Gloomhaven port just makes me want to play Trials of Fire again. by Mischief Maker 10/21/2021, 6:13am PDT I always liked Trials of Fire, and wow do I like it more now that I've played the PC port of the board game that was clearly a heavy influence. The Gloomhaven port reminds me of other board game to PC ports like Prodigy Tactics where actually messing with the physical parts of the board game is a huge and time-consuming part of the game. So they make a PC port and now the computer takes care of 90% of the busywork and wow, this is so much faster than playing the boardgame. But the problem is, they never ask how the game plays in a world where the board game doesn't exist to be used in comparison and the answer is: really fucking clunky. I may not be shuffling combat modifiers or putting cards into viewport sleeves, or cranking HP and XP counters, but the game is making me do 4 or 5 unnecessary clicks for actions that really only should take one. Compare to Trials of Fire, which was clearly influenced by Gloomhaven, but also built from the ground up as a PC game and wow is the experience smoother. Where playing a movement card and shifting over a few hexes could easily take 5+ clicks in the Gloomhaven port, in ToF you just drag and drop your player token within the defined movement range, and while hovering over hexes get an automatic indication of which enemies are in line-of-sight or not. And on the aesthetics side, the Gloomhaven port seems bound and determined to look as little like a board game as possible, which IMO robs it of most of the charm and just ends up looking like a generic cartoony Unity engine game that's a dime a dozen. ToF, on the other hand, plays hard into the board game aesthetic, with your cardboard tokens on the world map moving with a bouncing gait like they're being moved by hand one hex at a time. Combat maps look like pop-up books, your action choices fan out like a hand of cards, and while your characters and enemies are represented by circular tokens, the game pulls out all the graphical stops for actual spell and attack effects, with things like arrow shots knocking the physical enemy token back before rolling into place, and dying enemy tokens dramatically exploding into shards. Compare that to the Gloomhaven port's rather pathetic stab attack of the fully 3D-rendered Brute. It's a pity, I was really looking forward to the Gloomhaven port, but Trials of Fire is just quicker, smoother, and delivers so much better on Jerry's wish for an enchanted board game. For a videogame it looks dime-a-dozen, comared to: Now that's unique, and SO MUCH SMOOTHER IN ACTION!

The Gloomhaven port just makes me want to play Trials of Fire again. by Mischief Maker 10/21/2021, 6:13am PDT