With so much to offer and such a great presentation, it’s hard for me not to consider Armello a must-buy for anyone with even a passing interest in digital board games or innovative RPGs. Deep gameplay and a wide variety of characters, victory conditions, and more, there’s a ton to dive into that’s all wrapped in a gorgeous package.
Armello is so gorgeous, it kept reminding us that there is no an actual physical board game like this even though it really deserves to be. The game successfully mixes several elements from other genres, telling story and making our imagination run wild.
I don't get why this game is hated for it's "luck based" gameplay. It involves Dice and Cards, so of course it's about having luck just like in almost every other Board Game.
But even then, you have enough decisions to make in your turn and strategize what to do next. You can even play some cards in the Enemy's turn to hinder them and study what their goals are.
I don't think a Board Game revolving around luck is a bad thing.
It's a really fun game to play with friends!
This game is to me what the clock is to civilization. Absolutely divine.
**** in your quick opinions. Anyone in the gaming industry should study this game. Do not approach it to critique, but to learn. The balance is perfect, and anyone who would differ is just wrong.
I’d highly recommend Armello to fans of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, D&D, or anyone wanting to branch out from traditional board games. The graphics, though not the most exceptional in terms of quality, are beautiful; the combination of 3D effects with almost anime-esque cu scenes gives the game a unique and striking look. It’s interesting, the music has a calming effect, and it gives so much for a relatively unknown game, for not much money.
An intelligent and beautiful virtual table top-game, that can be very fun if played online. Especially with friends. The ruleset isn't perfect, and its multiplayer-only nature leaves something to be desired, but it's still pretty impressive as a first try.
While it doesn’t quite compete with some of the compelling tabletop games I have played over the past couple of years—and it’s marred by some confusing design choices that stand to stifle some of its more unique features—if you and a group of friends enjoy tabletop games but struggle to find the time to meet up and play them, then you’ll likely find Armello worthy of your time.
I admire what League of Geeks has attempted because I’m their target audience. But it’s deeply frustrating to peer down through this smear of bad decisions at a design I really want to play. This should be a great fifteen-minute adventure. It has the necessary components: smart interlocking gameplay systems, snappy pacing, adorable artwork and animation, a truly imaginative setting. But it’s not a fifteen minute adventure. It’s an hour-long interface nightmare. Armello, which would be a great boardgame, is a terrible videogame.
The game is a unique free for all strategy game where every player can destroy themselves and take you with them. Mix in some random elements that spice up the strategies that you must employ to win and you have yourself a fun strategy game.
The game's stability in terms of connection issues isn't the best in the world but I believe some may be over exaggerating how poorly this game handles connection.
The game's RNG isn't ruining the experience.
No you're not suppose to fight anyone without shield equipment and expect to live. Stop blaming your lack of strategy on RNG. I will concede and say that the map generation can be pretty bad sometimes.
The game shouldn't take an hour. Just hurry up and try to succeed the palace perils when you are strong enough to win. There's a reason that the card that lowers peril difficulty is the most common card in the game. I've been able to win against 3 real opponents in turn 5 which took me about 20 minutes. Games where I'm playing against competent opponents rarely last for longer than 40 minutes. I will say that if there was a way to speed up some of the animations I would do so in a heart beat.
I promise you that your patience will be rewarded if you stick with this game and don't get discouraged.
Fun and simple, graphically attractive. The right balance between luck and strategy. For each clan strategies completely change the way you play. Online mode very well done.
Gorgeous art, setting and animations with a nice smattering of lore.
Absolutely awful everything else.
Even for a board game, luck plays an absolutely enormous role - there's an abundance of player targeting cards, turn ending cards making most games a trade off between a war of attrition and an outright slug-fest. The games turns pass incredibly slow for various reasons with decisions such as making dice rolls take an extremely long time because of the game slowly tallying all the character's bonuses and equipment on screen. The average game is an hour to two hours and you may spend most of that knowing your presence has been rendered moot.
The UI is extremely poor, making it very hard to quickly find information about cards, players, equipment and quests when you need it and sometimes leading to misclicks, wasted turns or premature dice rolls.
The quest system in particular is one of the worst mechanics in a game - the quest will always spawn opposite your board position, encouraging you to delay accepting a quest until you can manipulate where it will appear. The quests hint at the type of tile they will be on without outright stating it - they might as well just state it - why make yet another part of the game down to chance?
The game is also quite buggy, with frequent disconnects and no feature to reconnect - if a player is disconnected, he or she is replaced with a bot and she or he may NOT reconnect by any means, even in a private game with friends.
Most of your strategy will center around mitigating luck, but you will quickly find there is so much luck to mitigate (and you require luck in your favor to mitigate it to begin with) making the amount of strategy in the game questionable at best.
The game might make an okay social game if you have 3 friends and a 3rd party voice program, but I'm baffled who would want to play it under any other circumstance for more than 3 games at most.
The original 8 characters are also (with a few exceptions) notably less powerful than the DLC cast, which may explain why the game is often on sale but the DLC never is.
I can't recommend this, unless you want to support the artists behind it, because at the very least, THEY did a very good job.
Another promising game based on an interesting premise, spoiled by the Ameritrash design approach, in other words, every event in the game must involve tons of dice rolls - one dice does not suffice here, you have to roll dozens of them at once, apparently. The slick interface and nice art is marred by mandatory blur and bloom that gives the impression you are losing your eyesight to glaucoma. After a few hours of unfocused trodding on a map at the mercy of the RNG, you will shelve the game, never to return.
Think Talisman, with better lore and graphics, blurred and bloomed to hell, with more directions to go.
So much beautiful art, totally wasted.
SummaryA swashbuckling adventure that combines the strategic play of card and board games with RPG elements. Wage single and multiplayer strategy battles as you adventure across the land of Armello on your quest for the throne.