It wasn’t playtested for shit and it’s obvious. They rushed out the core game just so they could say they hit their Kickstarter promise date. There are some minor issues they didnt catch like symbols on cards being wrong but nothing major.
What really got people is they lied about stuff. During the campaign they said the game would take 60-90 minutes which was cool with me. The game takes way longer than that. The core box even has 90 minutes on the side, but on the back it says 120 minutes. My friend and I played through the first battle, and we didn’t have problems with the rules or have to look shit up, it took us 4.5 hours.
You have to grind through every fight, and if you die or feel like you aren’t geared enough (more on that below) then you reset the board and start over, while keeping your exp and gear (like the game). Then you grind through the exact same mobs and board setup as before just to get more exp and gear.
The mechanics of buying and equipping gear is also terrible. You just draw stuff from a massive deck with every item in it, so you may draw noob stuff but you may draw obviously powerful stuff, but you can’t equip it because you don’t have enough exp to level up to meet the requirements. Also different gear requires different stats so if you level one stat up too high to use that big sword you drew then you don’t have enough exp to level up some other stat to wear the armor you drew.
So basically you’re just grinding through the same encounters (which aren’t hard, and don’t change tactics) to hopefully draw gear you can use and hopefully your stats allow you to use more than one of the gear you have lying in a pile.
If they would have just delayed 9-12 months and shipped with better rules and the stretch goals (so there’s more variety) it could have been a really good game I think. The components are nice, the miniatures aren’t bad at all, they just fucked up.
Then they delayed waves of stretch goals and expansions, have consistently lied about delays and other stuff (some stuff is still waiting for Bandai approval, 1.5 years after the core game shipped). Changed a good looking miniature into a fucking retarded one with no feedback. The best fuckup was they framed out translating to another language to some company that literally copy pasted the English into google translate and sent it back to them. They didn’t get anyone who spoke the other languages to look at it, and just shipped it. Once backers got it, they blew up and they had to get it all redone, costing them another six month delay or something.
There are some very well done house rules out there, that people even did in the exact style of the rule book, that probably fix all the garbage above but the whole experience has left such a sour taste in everyone’s mouth that most people aren’t willing to go back and try to fix it themselves. I walked by their booth at Gencon a few times and their DS demo sat untouched all day.
