Talisman Digital Edition for Nintendo Switch Review

Developed By: Nomad Games
Published By: Nomad Games
Catagories: Tabletop, RPG
Release Date: 03.09.2020

Talisman Digital Edition is the most recent in attempts to make videogames off of the Games Workshop tabletop series, specifically the fourth edition, which was released in 2007. For better or worse, the video game is an accurate conversion of the tabletop game for everything it does good and all of it’s faults, including the need to buy the large number of expansions.

GETTING STARTED ON YOUR JOURNEY

First, one should familiarize themselves with Talisman as the tabletop itself. Imagine mixing a Role Playing Game with a board game. While you chose your class, aliance, and make decision when needed during a game, things are how the game presents them. A character has five sets of stats, all of which can be upgraded and differ between class. Both Craft (magic) and strength are used in combat. Life and Gold being self explanatory. Last is Fate, this allows you to reroll die if available.

The goal of each game is to go deeper into the board’s intial three layers in order to reach The Crown of Command. To do so, a player is strongly encouraged to raise their stats, buy available equipment cards and then find the rare Talisman. When you land on an empty space not occupied by shops, churces, or taverns, an Adventure card is drawn. These can be items to help your journey, bad weather to impede it, magic that can either assist who lands on a space or pester them. Even followers who can give you assistance when requirements are fulfiled. Occasionally a fight can happen, winning these gives trophies, upon winning three trophies, they can be traded in for additional strength, almost like experience points. Once one reaches The Crown of Command, the player can use the command skill, taking away life from every other player once a turn until nobody else is left.

EASE OF PLAY

The game has a very basic UI lending itself well to touch screen use, for this I’d recommend only playing the game in handheld mode if possible. Using the touch screen for the game is convenient and everything allows you to tap to confirm. Using standard button use isn’t quite as convenient as it goes step by step instead of allowing smooth scrolling across the screen. For this alone if you need to play the digital version of Talisman, play it on something that doesn’t require you use a controller, like PC or Switch.

A LONG QUEST…BETTER TOGETHER

If you plan on playing the game by yourself, don’t. The game is slow, a terrible dragging slog of an experience when alone where games, even when sped up take at least an hour to get anywhere, that is to say if they go anywhere. Like many board or tabletop games, majority of actions are decided by a dice roll, this brings RNG into the game, making a slow game even more slow and random. When playing alone, it turns into your character hoping to get somewhere, hoping to do enough damage to not die in battle, and hoping to by chance get an item needed to reach the goal in the middle of the board. This isn’t fun, it’s boring and almost feels like a waste of time to hope you get somewhere. Since playing alone isn’t quite ideal, it’s pleasant that the game supports multiplayer in both online and local up to six players. While local multiplayer would raise the question of why buy the videogame instead of the actual tabletop game, the tabletop game doesn’t support playing over the internet, giving at least one reason to buy the digital edition especially in current times where it might not be possible to have large public events.

MAYBE TOO CLOSE TO THE REAL THING

There’s no real flair to the game, the art is what the tabletop game uses, the figures the same. The goal was to make an accurate digital version and Nomad Games did an admirable job at this. This however makes it hard to find new players to purchase the game. If someone is a fan of the tabletop game, you would assume they wouldn’t need to get the digital version as it’d be redundant, especially when over $60 worth of expansions are available for the digital version. This makes finding who the audience is supposed to be outside of the developers. While it’s a shockingly true to the source material, it doesn’t merit it’s existence.