“OK, I can’t really go there, can’t jump the cliffs, there is no cave in the area, fogs are already explored.”
“Yep.”
“Technically, I could try moving against these guys, but I can’t defeat them alone anyway.”
“Yep.”
“So I think my best option is to call it a day and go to sleep in the tent.”
Everything must come to an end, even good things must come to an end, and the last installment in a trilogy will inevitably be a disappointment. These are just facts of life. The third and final game in the Legends of Andor series (see our reviews for parts I and II) humbly abides by these rules. So here we are, for the third time, maybe a bit tired, maybe a bit disillusioned, but still fighting for righteousness and good, and still showing those pesky cardboard standee monsters who’s the boss!
I’m not sure how much introduction we need at this point, considering this is the third game in the series… I definitely recommend going in order, so check out our reviews for the first and second games before taking this one on. It probably comes as no surprise that this is the same game once again. Same, but somewhat different.
Our heroes are back, including my favorite dwarf, for the final confrontation. As we all remember, there was a “big” reveal at the end of Andor 2, and as a result, we are finally taking the fight to the enemy, and we are leading an invasion into the heart of the Krahden empire.
In order to not repeat ourselves as much, similar to the second game’s review, we split the review into three main sections: The Same (things that haven’t changed since the previous two games), The Better (things that are improvements), and the Worse (figure this last one out as homework).
The Same
Honestly, most of the game is the same as Andor 1. It did a full Rise of Skywalker on the refreshing changes Andor 2 applied to the original formula. There is no boat, fame, giant monsters, new heroes. Once again, the main loss condition is letting too many enemies enter your base. I guess this qualifies as Same. Although it is also somewhat Worse, because the other two games did something quite original in their own time, and this one does not.
(Wow, just going back to that RoS analogy quickly, I must say, I honestly am very proud of myself to come up with that. But on with the review…)
Artwork is the same level of detailed, handpainted beauty, thumbs up once again. We are used to a certain level of excellence at this point in the series, but the game delivers. The toybox aspect remained as well, this time we get a tent and a supply wagon, it’s cooler than you might think, there are nice enemies, items, tokens, etc. As exciting as ever.
The story is the same type of serious, straight-faced cliche, without any sign of cheesiness. It still feels like a very badly written story that you can forgive, maybe because it’s old and the first time you heard it you were a kid and your standards were much lower, and now you love it, no matter what. That is the kind of story Andor aspires to be, and it does succeed in my opinion. I can’t stress how much I prefer this honest approach to something that just desperately wants to be funny. (We recently played Dungeons 3, and I still cringe.) But yeah, it is dry and emotionless, you have to elevate it with your “RPG banter” at the table, the game does not do the heavy lifting for you.
The Better
The structure of the story is probably the best of the three games, it is coherent, without sudden twists and turns. We are invading a land, and going deeper and deeper, and that’s it. The hero-specific story is also very rich compared to the previous two games, you get hero-specific side quests and punishments. I think it’s the first time when you get cards that are purely flavor text. The heroes run into old friends and enemies, some become kings, others finally obtain a horse. Are they good stories, you might ask? Well, no, they are not good in any meaning of the word, but they are here, and they add a surprising amount of emotion to the game.
Heroes are also much more interesting from a game mechanic perspective, they all have one extra skill. The warrior can transport other people and gets a charge action in battle, the wizard can use magic books, the archer can brew potions, and the dwarf is less susceptible to dying of hunger – more on that later.
There are some other small ideas that we really liked in the game. Supply wagon / tent is cool, it is a moving base, and the enemies dynamically converge to its location, so that is what you have to defend. The desolate land was an interesting change, with the ravines where you either have to build bridges or jump over but you need a lot of willpower to do that. There were also some memorable enemies like the unkillable ancient troll and the shadow thingy.
Also, to spice things up, there was one legend that was a hidden traitor level, one of the heroes gets possessed and fights against the others. I think that was cool, my partner in crime felt hurt because we could not play it in the intended way, with only the two of us. (The issue is that we both take two characters in our Andor playthrough, but we can’t pretend not to know what both of our heroes draw for hidden role.) Anyway, you can still play it as a regular legend with two or three players, we had to pretend there is only three of us instead of the usual four. I still think it’s a cool idea, even if we sadly couldn’t test it.
The Worse
Our biggest beef with the game was the difficulty level. Now, we did our fair share of gaming in our life. We are not saying we are proud, not saying we are ashamed, but it is a fact – we played a lot of games, and at this point we are confident in our gaming knowledge. So when we meet a new game, that comes from a well-established franchise we cherish, and we can’t beat the tutorial level, and actually have to cheat (pick a random cave not so randomly) to progress, we are generally not happy about it. It is particularly frustrating from a game that is patronizing enough to include these one-time use cardboard tokens (yes, somehow, even after two games, they thought that is a good idea), and you need to carefully lay them down so you can read what is on the other side when you successfully move to an area with a spring on it, congrats! All the while, because most of the mechanics are not yet introduced, and there is no safe space with the tent, it is mathematically impossible to feed everyone, so it comes down to lucky cave finds. Brrrr. The worst tutorial I have ever seen in my life, period.
So anyway, naturally, the voice in our head went like “Oh, this must be on purpose, this must be a really hardcore game, the developers figured only the strongest remained by this point, so they can go nuts, better be very careful with our every move.” But no. The tutorial was the last actual challenge we faced in the entire game! Andor 3 is definitely the easiest of the three games (if you don’t count the unbeatable tutorial of course). The engine is simply not as tight as the previous two. In those games, the last couple of rounds were always the most nerve-wracking, we had decisions like “ermagad I can buy one extra strength if we do ten different things in the next three turns, so let’s do that before we attack the final foe”, here it’s more like “meh, we might as well attack, I know we have three rounds left, but it’s not like we have anything better to do”.
Second. Whenever you come up with a prototype of a game, and it feels like it’s getting there, but something is still missing, and you are brainstorming with friends and colleagues, and someone writes “feed your people every turn” on the board, here is my advice: erase that last sentence, throw the board out of the window, and sever your connections to the person who wrote it. I’m not saying it never ever works. But it almost never works. It’s a used up, boring, bad game mechanic, and it certainly has no place in the epic finale of a silly high fantasy game. Honestly, most of the time you are fighting against malnutrition, not against orcs or skeletons or whatever. In the beginning, it’s daunting to get enough food, outright impossible in the tutorial, whoopsie, someone didn’t playtest that correctly, yes, it still hurts, and by the end, it becomes a simple, tiresome chore.
The rules are poorly written, and the whole game has a rushed feeling to it. Halfway through, I realized I should have kept a list of the items I found, because it really is full of tiny typos and font formatting inconsistencies and mistranslations and rule clarifications being present on one of the randomly drawn cards but not on the other two, I should have kept a list, but it seemed petty. “And as a petty and vindictive individual, I have to take extra care not to appear petty or vindictive”, as the well-deservedly world-famous Peep Show series scene goes.
However, there are some larger issues too. Some rules are just ignored in the rulebook. I still don’t know what you are supposed to do with the cave tokens. (And at this point, I am afraid to ask, but I am going to stop with the references.) You refresh them at every dawn, yes, but do you re-shuffle them, once you run out? The wizard gets some magic books that can be opened and then used but the rulebook never clarifies how. Are they lost after one use? Do you have to learn them again? Or does it cost action points to use them? You know where I finally found the answer? In the Easy rules section, that relaxed the rule, which made us come to the conclusion that said relaxed rules were supposed to be applied in the Normal difficulty. If that was not enough confusion, rules are very obviously copy-pasted from the base game. Just one example: in the moving section, it emphasizes that you have to uncover fog tokens, if you end your movement, but forgets to mention that you also have to do that with the caves, which makes no sense. I know we are in the petty territory now, so, next!
There is this famous game design theory: you have to stop players from optimizing the fun out of the game. The issue is that it is obligatory in Legends of Andor games, and especially in this last one. One example: on the last level, monsters move when you cross the 4th hour. Another way of reading that is that monsters NEVER move as long as you don’t cross the 4th hour. We knew that if they move two or three times, there is no way we can win because five different groups are descending upon the poor undefended tent. But if you go to sleep after four hours of work, which would be what, 1 pm, like every self-respecting hero would do, you have nothing to fear! We think that is the only way to win the last chapter, but it certainly felt cheap.
There is less episodic derping, which we actually liked, but the first 6 episodes are painfully similar, we move the wagon from the upper right corner of the map to the bottom left, and every level is basically the same. Every legend seems to follow the same flow. In the beginning, you give the telescope to someone, that hero explores the fogs, hopefully, obtain a cowl fast, give it to the dwarf who can explore caves easily, collect all the resources on the map without triggering bad fogs, get the ancient weapons which you will use precisely once, during the final boss fight. As soon as the letter <?> comes, you will know what your actual mission is, and we will take it from there. There is a lot of pre-determined, pre-calculated busy work at the beginning of every game, the first couple of rounds always feel like part of the setup rather than an outcome of meaningful decisions. It’s made even worse by the fact that very often you find that your best option is to not do anything, go to bed early, see what happens overnight, and take it from there. I always had a slightly depressing feeling from this. I go to bed pointlessly early when I am depressed in real life, but I don’t need that in my supposedly feel-good escapism, thank you very much!
And last, but definitely not least, the ending. It is bad. The ending of Andor 3 is a huge flop. It’s like Return of the Jedi times Mass Effect 3 to the power of Rise of Skywalker plus Witcher 3 kidding with that last bit don’t worry. Seriously though, there is no real boss fight, no nothing. Not going to spoil the details, but the final level feels exciting at first glance, with all the strategic options, shutting down fortresses etc, but then fails so hard it still hurts. So it turns out that the final boss was what all along? Hunger? Existentialism?
The Co-Op
Once again, very similar to Andor 2 which is very similar to Andor 1. Not going to repeat it in detail, co-op is great and makes you brainstorm a lot and carefully consider your options.
Although I have to say, this is a much easier game than the other two, which means there is more room for errors, which means the alpha-player problem is much less prevalent. In case you play with alpha-players or worry that you are the dreaded alpha-player, this might be important information. But in general you should just be nice to each other.
The Recommendation
See, we tend to mock Andor for its weird seriousness, cookie-cut characters, silly but convoluted story, but the fact remains, we can mock it because it tries to do all these things in the first place. An overarching story in a board game series – think about that a bit. Heck, it is the only board game trilogy out there! (Correct me if I’m wrong. At the time of writing this, we are still waiting for Pandemic Legacy Season 3.) It is a game that continues for three separate instalments, and if that is not cool, I don’t know what is! So it is on that level we are appraising this game, which might not be fair. I mean, would you ever hear us complaining about the character arcs in Pandemic not feeling well-earned or the story in Ghost Stories being cheesy or any nonsense like that? Of course not. Honestly, it feels weird that a board game has characters at all, and playing the trilogy just for experiencing this aspect would in itself be worth it, and I can’t help but love this series just for that. Even if the last game is a bit derpy.
Does Legends of Andor: Last Hope stand on its own? Not really, Andor 1 and Andor 2 are both better games in the very same subgenre. But if you played the first two games, I don’t think you should stop, the end of Andor 2 is simply not a satisfying stopping point. Sure, Andor 3 is a bit boring, sure, the end is disappointing, but it’s still the closing chapter in the experience we got so excited about all those years ago when we met the first game. I’m glad I had the pleasure of playing this through. And you won’t catch me giving it a worse than Good score, even if we rate games that are far better as Mediocre. (And in that, it kinda reminds me of Van Helsing 3.)
So I don’t know. Do we recommend Legends of Andor: Last Hope? No. We can’t do that. What we can do, and did do, is recommend Legends of Andor, with our full professional board- and video game review power. You either ignore that recommendation, or you don’t, and then you see where it takes you. Legends of Andor: Last Hope is a game you can only recommend for yourself.
Info
| Release Year | 2017 |
| Genre | Puzzle, Strategy |
| Difficulty | Extreme |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 2 hours per Legend |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Great |