Sword & Sorcery – Immortal Souls
Five heroes awoke from the dead and were made immortal to save the kingdom from the rise of darkness. In Sword & Sorcery – Immortal Souls, up to five players control one or more of these legendary characters brought back to life by powerful sorcery, to fight against the forces of evil, controlled by the game itself.
60m - 90m
1 - 5 Players
Ages 12+
Arkham52
Just finished the campaign from the base set and I just have to say: I am thoroughly disappointed. It may come as strange to first say that the actual mechanics in the game are good and interesting but everything else tied to it just does not deliver. TLDR Game mechanic is awesome. But the game lacks content, you need the expansion to finish the game, it has too many working but unecessary parts, story is poorly written, rulebook could've been written better, alignment differences are not substantial and feel artificial. Full list of issues I had with the game: - For such a high price, you only get 6 missions campaign with very little replayability as you will see most of things within your first playthrough. - Very bad intro to the game. The first mission of these kind of games is always light on content and serves as an introduction to the base mechanics of the game. S&S however has the first mission last for hours, throws a ton of content your way (and questions) which takes away from the initial fun.. - Map tiles are badly done. It is confusing what is a wall and what is not and it's not always easy to see at first glance where does one area end and another begin. - The game lacks content. You start out with 5 heroes, that can be different alignments and some different skills, but even different alignments have a LOT of shared skills. Extra heroes can be (of course) bought with hero packs and NONE are included in the expansion. Oh, and YOU NEED the expansion just so you can finish the damn campaign (you get only act 1 out of 2). This is unacceptable when you compare to similar games (even Descent). This is a major issue for me because they place everything behind a hefty paywall even though the development of the game was Kickstarted...Speaking of bad behaviour, I lost my Shaman scroll card and politely asked if I can get the file to print just this one card. To note is that a version already exists online (placed by Ares) but in a poor resolution. No reply. They did show some respect to consumers online, so maybe they missed it. Somehow. So I sent again. No reply. - The game is complex to the point it's difficult to get things right all the time, let alone manage everything. It's very easy to forget even basic things like to apply domination bonus, or if the the enemy is blocked by another. As an owner of the game it was damn difficult to oversee if everything was played according to the rules without checking every little action my teamates did. Because monsters are divided among players it's easy for someone to mess up and don't apply their reaction or passive skill. Every session I had to spend many minutes re-reading the rules and searching for clarifications on the net. This is because: 1) Rulebook is poorly done (there is not even a components list!). The index is categorized by topics rather than names which makes things more difficult to find. 2) There are too many rules and not all of them are really needed. I mean, why do enemy monsters block line of sight, but your heroes don't? Was that necessary? Also, why could not the book of secrets and the questbook be one book? This is a general problem of the game, there is so many things scattered all over the place, but not adding much in return. - The story feels very corny and shallow and your typical run-of-the mill storyline with an initial twist that tries to sound epic. - The only great thing about the game is the combat mechanic which is very interesting, well done and challenging. However, after you finish the combat, depending on the event, you can have same number of ENEMY RESPAWN so now you again have to fight. This can be very exhausting. As a side note, be ready to have ample space ready for all the tokens, books, tiles and hero sheets. This game is hogs as much space as it can. I'm not really happy with my purchase, especially the ACT II being in an expansion. I will definitely think twice before buying anything from Ares again.
Aschenvogel
My Pros&Cons (Retail Version): 5 Players without the need for an overlord. The monster AI really works well and the management is distributed to all players. Game delivers a really good dungeon crawling feeling. Story unfolds during playing a scenario trough events and roadmarks. In the first scenario there might only be two or three options to choose from in an event but the decision making gets deeper and more meaningful as the story goes on. Lots of dice rolling but you almost never really miss an attack just by rolling an X or something like that. Looting treasures and leveling up your characters is fun! Story itself (played 4 of 7 quests so far) is only mildly interesting, mostly common fantasy stuff. Partly unlogical and involuntarily comical. Too much useless tokens! I've never used the tokens for armor, hits, etc. so far. Insert is completely useless as soon as you punch anything out. I find that really infuriating. Just do a well thought-out one or no insert at all! I would have preferred no separation in book of secrets and book of adventures. Just put the paragraphs of the book of secrets behind the scenario they belong to. That way you wouldn't have to constantly look up something in one of three books (rules/adventure/secrets). In the base game are only 5 heroes and a few different types of enemies. More variety in both would have been nice (you can play all heroes on two different sides but that doesn't offer much variety in my opinion. It's basically the heroes's signature move that changes and one or two abilities per hero). My biggest complaint: The rules are waaaaaaaay to fiddly! Man, I have never played another game in my life in which I forgot about more rules than Sword&Sorcery. I wrote a "rules summery" that took me 8 pages (Gloomhaven took me 2 and 2 for the character retirement). I constantly have to look something up either in the rule book or on several different cards. If I want to make an attack for example I have to look on my character sheet, weapon(s) and inventory item(s) and ability cards and I have to remember rules about dominating an area, focus attacks, LoS and being engaged in combat. Than I have to look on at least 2 up to 4 cards to decide what defensive values my target has. Has it resistances? Has it a defense roll? Has it armor or magical armor? Is it knocked down? Has it special defense actions? It gets better the more you play obviously but I guarantee theres always something I forget. This belongs to the point of rule fiddliness which makes it even worse: The card design is very unstructured and overload with text and symbols. Game comes with a reference sheet but that misses some important rules. Despite all the negative aspects I really grew to like this game after several plays. I can't really tell the reasons for this but I really like playing it and think it's a fun game.
Aldawen
We rarely play campaign based games due to lack of time so we figured if we were in a mood for campaign based dungeon crawl we would rather play Arcadia Quest. Plus I found rules too thick and confusing and in the end the big box also just took shelf space so the beast went away.