On the deadly peninsula of Chult, an adventuring party must fight their way through dangerous jungles, labyrinths, and dungeons to find and reverse the cause of the death curse. Choose to play as one or more of the four adventurers Artus Cimber, Asharra, Birdsong, and Dragonbait to face many perilous challenges and deadly foes throughout the quest.
Features of Tales from Candlekeep Tomb of Annihilation
- The procedural map generation allows every quest to remain unique even when replaying them multiple times.
- The game features a mix of Main Story quests and Sidequests.
- The game highlights most of the features from the popular board game, combined with features unique to the digital version.
- Collect rare crafting materials. Craft powerful weapons and armors to strengthen your heroes.
Gameplay
Tales From Candlekeep: Tomb Of Annihilation is based on the upcoming D&D Adventure System Board Game Tomb Of Annihilation.
This is a true-to-form translation of the board game experience to a digital board game experience. If you have played any of the D&D Adventure Series board games, then you will feel right at home here, for sure. The same basic rules for the board games will apply here, there a few changes, to help the translation to a video game, mainly there is a new crafting system, and you can cancel encounters by using adrenaline that will you build up after you defeat monsters.
They managed to capture the feel of the board game, via a video game, right down to those nasty encounters that will pop up and might be a bad thing for you, Monsters spawn, ill effects. That’s part of the board game for those that did not know, and I’ve seen a few people talking about that, Keep in mind, you don’t get an encounter on every hero turn. You only get an encounter when your hero doesn’t explore a new tile or when the newly explored tile is of a special type that causes an encounter anyway. They are random, could be good, or bad, it’s the RNG that decided your fate!
Graphics And Animation
The look of the game is great, the colors in the jungle are lush and green, the character models, and the monsters are well done, and detailed. As this is based on a tile laying game, I truly love the fact they chose to have the new tiles, “drop” from the sky. Another way you are immersed into the game. The characters move fluid and combat does not seem to stutter.
Sound
I’m a sucker for video game music, if you read some of my other reviews, you will know this. Let me say I love this soundtrack, I want it as a DLC. Just to play as I’m working or cleaning or something, it’s great. It sets the mood just right, wonderful use of instruments.
The Negatives
So far I’ve been pretty positive about the game, and overall I am. But, all’s not well in the jungles of Chult.
The crafting system
As you complete quests or come across chests to open, you will gain materials, when you have enough you will see the tool’s icon light on your char portrait, you can go in and craft new items for your heroes! That sounds great! UNTIL you see it’s a random system like you can lose all your material when you fail, sure you can throw in some gold coins to bump your chance up, BUT that will not guarantee you success, you might fail, so you out the material and you’re precious hard-earned gold. I just don’t like this at all, it seems like it’s out of place, it feels very much like loot boxes without the having to buy keys part if that makes sense. this is not part of the board game one of the system they put in, which I understand the basic thought of why, just the way it’s implemented is bad in my opinion, at one point I was ready to craft a new bow, so I throw up some gold that I was saving up and bumped by chance to 90 % and STILL FAILED. Just no.
*EDIT* After this post went up, BKOM Studios have announced a patch that will be live later today, part of the patch is going to remove the failure option that I had my major problem with
We are removing failures on crafting. All items will have a 100% success chance and all costs will be set to the current 80% gold price.
Final Thoughts
I can’t say enough how this “feels” like your playing the board game. They captured the tabletop experience amazingly well here, other than the crafting system, this is a shining jewel in the crown of D&D Games, keep in mind this is based on the adventure system board games, so if you’re looking for a Baldur’s Gate type RPG, this is not it, nor is it trying to be, this is true reaction of the adventure system board game system, other than a few tweaks to improve the video game conversion.
BKOM studios have stated they have plans to bring out the other board games into this series as DLC, and multiplayer aspects as well. They have been open to feedback since the release of the game, and have already patched the game to reflect that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dinosaur to get even with it. And a Death curse to purge from the lands of Chult.
Tales From Candlekeep: Tomb Of Annihilation is available on Steam now.
If you want to check out the Tomb Of Annihilation Board game, it’s available for pre-order now and will release October 18th.
A big thank you to BKOM Studios for providing the game for this review, this in no way had any effect on the outcome of the review.
The preorder link found above, is an amazon affiliate link, DDO Players will get a small percent of the sale. This is a small way you can help support the site.
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