Ich poste hier mal den Facebook Eintrag von einem, der die Core-Box komplett durchgespielt hat:
Just finished ISS Vanguard. Every galaxy. Every planet. Every unique discovery (except 1). Did almost every single thing you can do. First, some practical data...
Luckily, it arrived the day after I came back from a 5 week holiday, and my wife is away visiting family, so I was able to devote a lot of time to it. It took me exactly 14 days of leaving it on the table and playing several hours every day. All in all, I logged 27 plays (which I define as one full planet exploration or equivalent - you don't always end up landing). Now, here are my thoughts...
First of all, it's a great experience. But I don't think it's a great GAME. As with other Awaken Realms titles, there's not always a whole lot of game there. Just like Tainted Grail (the other AR game I have vast experience with), the actual game mechanic is thin, repetitive and not robust enough to really hold the 40-60 hours you're likely to get out of the game. I'm happy to say that ISSV is more gamey than TG - there are both dice and cards, but still, there's not enough decision space for a campaign of this length.
What ultimately will keep you going is the ship phase. I've heard some people complain about the fact that it's all upkeep, and that's a fair criticism, but it's addictive as hell. Anyone who has played X-Com (and more specifically the old Microprose titles) will understand how time dilates. You might spend an hour just flicking through a folder and rolling dice, and it'll feel like 5 minutes. Some will be put off by all the bookkeeping, but I think most will feel compelled to keep playing the game, not because of what you encounter on the planets, but what that will unlock when you get back to your ship.
Speaking of the planets... I like the IDEA of going down to lots of different planets and investigating them, but even despite the repetitiveness of the core gameplay loop, I feel like most of the planet encounters are a bit thin. One issue is that the planets just don't feel fully fleshed out. The board (book) is covered with slots for changing cards, and therefore the main art is covered, and the art on the cards, while good, often doesn't portray the planet as a cohesive whole. The other issue is the way the logbook is mostly just excerpts of radio conversations. I think this works, and the app does an outstanding job with the voices, but after a couple of planets, they all just started to run together for me. I felt like I was just moving around rolling dice rather than actually exploring a planet.
Having said that, there are some nice puzzles on a few of the planets. Most, but not all of them make sense. The issue here though is that, like other AR games, the only real penalty for failure is grind. If you don't solve a puzzle, or complete everything you want on a planet, your crew might die (but you'll replace them), or you might just need to go through the motions again, rolling dice and flipping cards, even after you know exactly what you need to do. Fortunately, the grind isn't as bad as TG, and I only revisited 3 or 4 planets, and that was generally built into the story. I think I went back for a grind once or twice?
The app is completely unnecessary but mostly great. It logs your entries and choices so you don't have to do all the box ticking and page flipping, and the voice acting is the best I've encountered in a board game by a wide margin (sorry Oathsworn, James Cosmo is fantastic, but ISSV has multiple voice actors, which really makes a difference). However, there are a few mistakes in the app which can cause confusion at best, and failure at worst. After a few planets, I learned to keep the paper logbook beside me and double check any suspicious or important-seeming entries. I've seen times where part of the text is just cut off so you end up not setting things up correctly or going to the correct place. This is rare, but it does happen, and even one such error is pretty unacceptable.
Now... the story. I will stay far away from any spoilers, but I will just say that if you've played Mass Effect or especially read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space, you'll either love this because it's so similar or hate it because it's so similar. I'm a bit torn. The story was fine - better than Tainted Grail - but I wish it had been a bit more original.
Last few observations. Miniatures are, as always with AR, completely unnecessary. They just get in the way of the board and you have to constantly move them around to read text. I wish they were about 1/4 the size. Production value is as good as you'd expect with AR. Art is beautiful, I just wish it stood out more.
Final thought - This is definitely a great experience overall, but as is usually the case with AR, I wish the game were about half the length it is. I could have ignored a bunch of side stuff and just rushed to the end, but who wants to miss half the content? I don't regret my time with ISSV at all, but I'm also pretty tired of it now. This is exactly how I felt after TG, and I did get a second wind and came back for wave 2, but I didn't have the same stamina and ended up cutting corners on those. We'll see how I feel when wave 2 delivers.
