Armello (Switch eShop) Review

Beautifully designed and overflowing with charm, Armello is a modest digital board game that can’t quite break the shackles of luck-based gameplay to become a must-play game.

Played between four players – either yourself and three AI, or online against three other people – the Australian-made Armello sees a kingdom populated by anthropomorphic characters aiming to overthrow the malicious king. Under the influence of the sinister magical corruption known as Rot, the monarch has turned evil, where his actions threaten the kingdom’s inhabitants. The king’s corruption will also kill him over time, with his health points serving as Armello’s turn limit.

Competing against the three other players in the turn-based affair, achieving victory in Armello comes in four forms. Firstly, there’s the King Slayer victory, where the victor breaches the castle walls and kills the king while surviving the encounter. A Spirit Stone victory is attained by collecting four of the rare Spirit Stones and meeting the king to cleanse his corruption.  Or you can claim a Prestige victory for racking up more prestige points than any other player by the time the king dies of his corruption, or another player slays the king but dies during the encounter. Finally, there’s the Rot victory, similar to King Slayer, but the player has a higher Rot level than the king while killing him. The Rot victory feels like it serves the narrative purpose of one corrupted leader usurping another than actually being a functionally different victory method.

Before beginning your first game, Armello walks new players through an extended scripted prologue, capably teaching you the basics while introducing you to its varied cast of playable characters. There’s a good variety of characters replete with unique statistics, skills, and best tactics for varying styles of play and victory methods. Some characters favour a more direct approach, specialising in combat and brute force encounters, whereas others are more suited to stealth and underhanded tactics. In addition to the utterly adorable and diverse characters, you also equip a couple of modifiers prior to play which adds extra bonuses and modifiers – such as a combat boost on specific tiles on the playing board. Once the game starts, each character receives a hand of cards ranging from items, spells or tricks to use on yourself or sabotage other players. These cards are a shining point of Armello’s art design; I have never seen better designed and animated cards in any other video game. Filled with such beautifully detailed characters and environments, the cards designed by the talented artists from League of Geeks are beautiful moving images of the lush, rich world of Armello. It’s also a nice touch that by viewing individual cards, you can read the names of the artists and animators who worked on its visuals.

Unfortunately, behind Armello’s fascinating premise and beautiful world are various frustrating design choices and bugs. My early experience during the prologue was hampered by several tutorial prompts layering on top of one another, and when I tried to dismiss one, the other prompts would also close, meaning I missed several pieces of information. Most annoying is Armello’s bafflingly tiny user interface with hard-to-read text; even with good eyesight, I struggled to read much of what was happening on-screen, especially when playing in handheld mode. Hopefully, a future update allows for text magnification or some other method of increasing the UI size. I also experienced long loading times when selecting options in the main menu, plus frame rate drops and skips when navigating the game board and during player transitions.

If you’re considering picking up Armello, please note that this is not a local multiplayer game. You can play single-player offline against AI characters, or online against other players. I can understand why local multiplayer isn’t viable for Armello, considering it relies on subterfuge and not knowing what your opponents are doing, but it’s disappointing for those hoping to pick up a digital board game to play with friends over. More annoying is that single-player provides an uneven experience, with AI characters making bizarre decisions at pivotal moments. One game I played saw one AI opponent complete the difficult act of breaching the castle walls with a King Slayer victory in sight on the final turn. The king was nearly dead, and this AI character was well-equipped to claim the win. However, instead of fighting the king, they retreated from the castle and ended their turn on a random, inconsequential tile, achieving nothing. This allowed me to swoop in with my Spirit Stones and steal victory from the Rot-ridden jaws of defeat – albeit a disappointingly hollow win. There are many custom game settings to tinker with which can increase or decrease the difficulty, but customised games don’t go towards the progression of unlocking achievements and new items.

Armello’s precarious balance between skill, strategy and chance is a source of frustration. Many encounter outcomes annoyingly rely on dice rolls or bordering-on-arbitrary skill checks. Comparatively, fellow Aussie tabletop game Hand of Fate 2’s chance elements are infused with non-binary outcomes beyond simply succeeding or failing. For example, HoF’s card-based encounters often include a huge success, minor success, minor failure, and huge failure results with outcome severity varying on a more fluid scale. On the other hand, Armello’s results are absolute. Winning an encounter nets you a reward, and you move on. Losing means you receive a consequence, but you learn nothing from it other than hoping the dice land more favourably next time.

Adding to this frustration is Armello’s disconnect between narrative and gameplay. Armello is surrounded by fascinating lore with such richly-designed characters and subtext behind each card, but there’s little interaction between it and the gameplay, making each game’s outcome feel relatively weightless.

I’m genuinely torn in reviewing Armello. I absolutely want Aussie devs to succeed, know the people at League of Geeks are supremely talented, and I think Armello is a good game – in fact, it has many wonderful traits. However, for every aspect I love, there’s something else gently nibbling away at my enjoyment of the game.

Armello’s Switch port is a good game hiding behind some user interface and minor performance issues – all things that can be patched in the future. If you don’t mind a digital board game not made for local multiplayer, Armello’s beautiful tabletop experience is worth checking out.

Score: 3.5/5