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As anyone who plays board games (or with friends who like board games) can attest, an involved, TTRPG-style board game can be cumbersome. From in-depth rules and systems, it takes a while to get into Gloomhaven and introducing new players to its dense combat can make multiplayer challenging. But also like a dense board game, Gloomhaven rewards you when you put in the work to learn its rules and systems. Its deep card-based tactics gameplay shines in its many modes.

Gloomhaven blends hexagonal, grid-based tactical gameplay with a truly unique card-based battling system that’s deeply challenging, but also very rewarding once you manage to get a hold of all its moving parts. Its in-depth tutorial is largely okay at teaching you what you need to know, though not very quickly.

As far as the basics go, it’s in line with most TTRPG-style tactics games. A character or enemy’s stats will determine the turn order and things like movement, as well as attacks and other in-battle abilities. But where Gloomhaven differs is the ways those things function. Instead of attacks that work on a cooldown that goes down by turns like you’d see in games like Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle or Sparks of Hope, everything in Gloomhaven functions on a card-based system. Want to move across the room? That’s locked to a card. How about taking aim at a nearby enemy with a ranged attack? You’ll need the right card for that.

Thankfully, Gloomhaven balances out this core conceit, at the cost of some of the luck-based elements that come with playing card games. If your ears perked up when you heard ‘card-based tactics game,’ you might be disappointed. Chances are, you thought of a game like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, or the no-longer Switch-bound Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but Gloomhaven shakes things up from the standard card-battler structure in an interesting way.

Instead of drawing cards at random, you’ll start each combat encounter with a full hand of 10 cards – that’s your entire deck. There are ways to add cards to your pool, but you’re always locked to a set number of cards in your hand. With each turn, you can choose two cards from your hand and one of the two actions on each card. There’s a catch to which actions you can select, though. Each selection has to be mirroring an action on the opposite side of the other card — choosing the top action on the first card means that you need to choose the bottom action on the second card.

Because of this, selecting the right card doesn’t just boil down to which action you want to do, it also requires planning which one you’re willing to sacrifice to get the play you need. And, again, everything in Gloomhaven is tied to these actions. This helps to make each turn count, but it also makes it really challenging. Most decks make it clear enough what combinations work best with each other, but that doesn’t make planning ahead for a particularly tough battle any easier.

To make that selection even more tense, Gloomhaven’s card system doesn’t cycle cards in and out of a discard pile. Instead, once a card’s been played, it’ll usually get discarded. Any card sent to the discard pile is stuck in said pile until you rest. Resting boils down to two options: long rest and short rest. Long rest takes up a turn, but also heals a chunk of your health, while short rest just resets your hand. Either way, you’re forced to burn a card from your discard pile, completely removing it from play.

Burning cards happens in a few situations. Resting is necessary, but there are situations where you can voluntarily burn cards to escape sticky situations. Some enemy attacks can be negated by burning cards as well. It’s a great way to dangle risk in front of the player because when a combatant runs out of cards, they’re exhausted and can’t fight anymore.

Thanks to its generally short combat encounters, every single action counts – down to the smallest movement. That sense of weight can be really satisfying once you have a firm grasp over both your player characters’ individual strengths and weaknesses and the game’s mechanics, but add in overwhelming and unwieldy menus and it can also make Gloomhaven extremely difficult to get into. With only a handful of cards at your disposal in a full hand, it’s very easy to run out and be forced to end a combat encounter early. Even Gloomhaven’s normal difficulty has some serious teeth, and isn’t a great place to start out even for tactically-inclined players.

But its short battles are really well-suited to Switch’s portable nature. Once you’ve nailed the basics, it’s easy to hop in and out of Gloomhaven without needing to deal with the catching up that can often come with other tactics-driven Switch games that feature extended encounters. We found ourselves playing a few turns before bed in handheld mode in the evening, and then waking up and finishing the combat encounter in the morning.

While it feels like a good fit for the console and runs well in both handheld and docked play, you may find Gloomhaven’s load times unbearable. From resetting a turn after a mis-input to jumping into a battle, Gloomhaven loads like molasses. To make matters worse, those mis-inputs happen annoyingly often thanks to the game’s unwieldy controls, and playing a mishap where it lies doesn’t jive considering how few actions you’re afforded in any given encounter.

Sluggish menus feel par for the course next to Gloomhaven’s difficult-to-parse combat. In overworld navigation and combat, every action is tied to a specific button — viewing the world map or adding items to your character’s inventory, for example — and nothing can be navigated another way, like with a D-Pad or control stick. These problems wouldn’t be nearly as invasive if there were more control options or remappable buttons but touch controls and alternate options for menu and combat navigation are nowhere to be found. These menu navigation problems are most pronounced in the game’s story mode, where cycling through objectives and following quests is a true hassle.

Menu issues aside, though, Gloomhaven’s campaign is unexpectedly fleshed out. Most of the story is fully voiced, and there are tons of small, random events that can affect your experience. Maybe you’ll witness a robbery on your way to a mission and be able to either turn the thief in or aid them in their crimes for a small cut of the take. Perhaps you’ll stumble on a community event that you can participate in to help build your reputation.

These little events add a welcome, flavorful sense of roleplaying to what would otherwise be a very straightforward tactics game. Events (and their outcomes) are randomized too, meaning that you’ll almost never encounter the same situation, even if the event begins the same way. They’re brief but add so much to the game in padding out combat encounters all while stringing them together really well.

Conclusion

Gloomhaven’s gameplay is deeply challenging and dense, and it almost always manages to provide a satisfying payoff in equal measure if you are able to look past its menus and control flaws (and can stomach its load times on Switch). It isn’t for the faint of heart, but those who stick with its complex, card-centric tactical gameplay will find a great strategy game.

This review, penned by Philip J Reed — our much-missed friend and Nintendo Life contributor — was originally published in January 2012. We’re updating and republishing it to mark the game’s arrival in the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack GBA library.

We have to hand this much to Kirby & The Amazing Mirror: it certainly isn’t afraid of trying new things. We might not be totally convinced of the necessity of those things, of course, but it’s always nice to see a series attempt to expand its boundaries somewhat.

The story forges no new ground whatsoever, though, as it’s based on the standard light world/dark world dynamic that we’ve seen in so many of Nintendo’s flagship franchises by this point that it’s practically a sub-genre. Kirby’s mission is to collect the shards of a magical mirror that will allow him to seal off the dark world for good, and let Dream Land get back to… whatever it is Dream Land does when it’s not under attack by something.

When you start playing, you’ll feel as though you’re in familiar territory: cute visuals, bouncy tunes, and some pretty standard platforming abound. Once you progress a little further, however, you’ll realise that this isn’t your standard, level-based Kirby adventure. Multiple exits adorn nearly every room, and if you find a map you can open it up and see just how convoluted the path ahead really is.

You see, within a single level you’ll fight several bosses and reach multiple goal rooms, but that doesn’t mean your work in that level is done. It’s up to you to scour every corner and unlock every secret, both of which will require much backtracking and pathfinding, giving this Kirby game a peculiar Metroid-like vibe.

This idea is appealing: Dream Land is quirky and varied enough that a looser allowance for exploration should be a good thing. In practice, though, it becomes irritating: rooms start to look the same before very long, and for most of the game you can only access certain levels through particular rooms in other levels. If you want to return somewhere to uncover a secret you couldn’t find before, you’re likely to find yourself trying every possible path until you stumble upon the right one.

The map, once you learn to read it as an abstract, is certainly helpful, but you’ll need a different map for each level. The hidden exits and alternate paths should liven up the experience somewhat, but, in actuality, it just manages to hide simple tasks behind tedious backtracking.

Kirby’s abilities shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s played a Kirby game before: he can fly, swim, inhale enemies, and steal powers. So far, so familiar. The controls feel a mite sluggish in their responsiveness, which really becomes a problem during boss fights and other fast-paced situations. There’s a slight delay between input and execution, and once that leads to a few cheap deaths you’ll come to regard it as a serious flaw.

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of the problems with Kirby & The Amazing Mirror. One conceit is that Kirby has been split into four entities of different colours, and let’s just say that the traditional pink Kirby must have all the brains. The other three Kirbys chaotically bound about, far more irritating than they are helpful. You can’t control them, so you just need to let them dominate the screen with their antics as they steal powers you wanted, get in your way, and even budge you into enemies and hazards.

Ostensibly, these additional three Kirbys are here to help, but good luck with that. Their AI is an embarrassment, and it’s a particular problem when you need one of them to trigger a switch, or a bomb block, or — heaven forbid — help you move something heavy by inhaling it with you. These three Kirbys do not stop moving long enough to realise you need their help, and their inclusion — and necessity — in this game drags the experience down severely. When playing multiplayer, however, each player gets to control a Kirby, and all of you work together or go off your own way and do whatever you want, even being able to go to completely opposite ends of the game world. With other people, it suddenly makes more sense (and, thankfully, the Nintendo Switch Online version enables you to play with others locally or over the internet).

It was a bizarre enough decision to give Kirby a cellphone in this game (yes, really), and the fact that he uses it to summon these rampaging nincompoops just adds insult to injury. The fact that the cellphone also has a function that causes you to exit the stage immediately makes things even worse: press the wrong button in the heat of the moment and you’re back to the start. The third or fourth time this happens, you might start to wonder why you’re bothering. We sure did.

The game’s not without its charms, though: the presentation is typically strong, with brilliant visuals and music as always. In fact, playing in short bursts can be quite fun: the classic Kirby actions of inhaling enemies and whooping them with their own weapons are as great here as they ever were. Unfortunately, the game isn’t really structured for short play sessions, what with its maze-like design and long-term goals rather than short, stage-based missions. There are a few minigames available to play which aren’t much fun solo but were largely intended for multiplayer and definitely work better with friends.

The main appeal of the game is meant to be the exploration, and for many it will be. For us, though, the exploration doesn’t feel particularly rewarding, the constant backtracking is unintuitive and dull, and your required companions are a group of hyperactive imbeciles. Fortunately, HAL would eventually get multiple-Kirby gameplay right in Kirby Mass Attack. This time around, though, consider it one big, well-intentioned misstep.

Conclusion

Kirby & The Amazing Mirror tries to introduce a lot of new things to the series, and because of that it was destined from the start to be a divisive title. Ultimately, though, we feel that the innovations here just aren’t particularly fun — certainly not for solo players. Sluggish controls and abysmal AI for your required companions sour the experience, and exploration quickly becomes more of a chore than a reward. Kirby’s had his share of ups and downs, certainly, but this is not the game we want to remember him by.