The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics asks you to lead the Gelfling and restore light to Thra, and it gives you 80 turn-based battles across the lands of that world to do it. BonusXP developed it. En Masse Entertainment published it. It arrived in 2020 for PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
It is a game built on a promise: that you can play through the events of the Netflix series and go beyond them, meeting characters, stories and environments the show never showed you. That promise is the whole reason this game exists. It is also the reason it lands where it does.
Trailer, via En Masse.
The Gelfling and the World of Thra
The setup is simple and it is the right one. Thra is a fantasy world, and the Gelfling are its heroes. The game hands you a squad and asks you to fight for the light. You recruit new allies as you go. You assign them jobs. You outfit them with new equipment. That loop — recruit, assign, equip, fight — is the spine of the whole thing.
The genre labels tell you what to expect before you press anything: role-playing, strategy, turn-based strategy, tactical. The perspective is bird view, isometric, the classic angle for a game that wants you to see the whole board at once. It is single player. There is no competitive mode here, no co-op, nothing that asks you to bring a friend.
What the game does with the license is the interesting part. It does not just retell the series. It goes past it. The source material promises playable characters, stories and environments that had not been seen before, and that is the pitch that separates this from a straight adaptation. A tie-in that only repeats what you already watched is a souvenir. A tie-in that extends the world is a reason to show up.
Eighty Battles Across the Lands of Thra
Eighty battles is a real number. It is not a figure tossed out to sound generous. It is the length of the campaign, and it is the thing you will spend your time with. Each one is a turn-based fight, and each one takes place somewhere in Thra.
That structure has a cost. Eighty fights is a lot of fights. A tactics game lives or dies on whether the individual battle asks you a question worth answering, and the format here — move units, use abilities, take the objective — is the format the genre has been running for years. BonusXP knows how to build a board. The question is whether the eightieth board still feels like it has something to say.
The customization is where the game tries to keep that answer alive. Jobs give your Gelfling a role. Equipment gives them an edge. Recruiting new allies gives you new pieces to move. If you like the fantasy of building a squad from a ragtag group into something that can hold a line, the systems are here to support it.
The lands of Thra are the other half of the draw. The environments are meant to be a tour of the world, and the game uses them as the backdrop for the campaign. Whether that tour holds up over 80 battles depends on how much variety the designers put into the boards themselves.
Jobs, Equipment and the Squad You Build
Here is the honest read on the customization. It is real, and it matters, but it is not deep enough to carry the game on its own. You assign jobs. You equip gear. You recruit. Those decisions shape your squad, and they give you reasons to care about individual units.
But the genre has moved. Tactical games now compete on how many genuinely different ways there are to solve a fight, and on how much a single unit’s build can change the answer. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics sits closer to the traditional end of that spectrum. It gives you the tools. It does not give you a sandbox.
That is not a failure. It is a choice, and it is a choice that fits the license. This is a game meant to be played through, not optimized to death. The Netflix series told a story. The game wants to let you walk through that story with your hands on the controls.
The single-player focus reinforces that. There is no ladder to climb, no meta to chase, no patch notes that will change how your favorite job works next month. You buy it, you play it, you finish it. In 2020, that was already becoming a rare shape for a strategy game.
What the Netflix Series Gives the Game
The series is the reason anyone outside a small tactics audience looked at this at all. The Dark Crystal is a known name, and Age of Resistance gave it a new generation of viewers. A game that lets you play in that world, with those characters, is an obvious move.
The obvious move is also the risky one. When you adapt a story people already love, you inherit their expectations. They want to see the moments they remember. They want to see the characters they cared about. The game says it delivers both — the events of the series, plus material beyond it.
That extra material is the smart part. It gives the game room to be its own thing rather than a highlights reel. New playable characters and new stories mean the campaign can surprise someone who watched every episode. New environments mean the world can open up in directions the show did not have time for.
Where the Campaign Slows Down
Eighty battles is a long road, and long roads have stretches that feel like travel rather than arrival. The turn-based structure is reliable, but reliability is not the same as excitement. When a fight does not ask you anything new, it becomes a chore you complete to reach the next story beat.
The isometric view is the right call for clarity. You can see the field, you can see your units, you can see the enemy. It is a clean way to present a tactical board. It is not a cinematic way. The game is not trying to be a movie between the fights.
So the rhythm of the campaign is: story, fight, customize, fight, story. That rhythm works when the fights are good. It drags when they are not. Over 80 of them, some will not be.
The good news is that the recruitment and equipment systems give you a reason to keep going even through a flat battle. A new ally is a new toy. A new piece of gear is a new option. The game understands that a tactics campaign needs a reward loop, and it builds one.
The Verdict on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
This is a competent tactics game with a good license and a long campaign. It does the fundamentals: turn-based combat, a squad you build, a world you tour. It does the license justice by going past the series instead of just repeating it.
It is not a game that will convert anyone who does not already like the genre. The systems are traditional. The depth is modest. The 80-battle structure is a commitment, and the game does not always earn that commitment battle by battle.
What it does earn is the attention of a specific player: someone who watched Age of Resistance, wants more of Thra, and is willing to spend a long campaign with a squad of Gelfling to get it. For that player, the trade is fair. You get the world, you get the characters, you get the fights.
For everyone else, this is a solid rental-grade tactics game with a familiar shape. It will not surprise you. It will keep you busy, and it will occasionally show you something the show did not.
IGDB’s critic aggregate puts The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics at 6.8 out of 10, drawn from six outlets. That number is right. This is a game that does its job without doing anything more than its job. It is worth your time if the world is worth your time. It is not worth your time if it is not.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics — 6.8 of 10
The Hard Numbers
- Title: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
- Year: 2020
- Developer: BonusXP
- Publisher: En Masse Entertainment
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
- Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical
- Theme: Fantasy
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
- Campaign battles: 80
- Critical score: 6.8/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 6 outlets)
How the Campaign Runs
| Stage | What happens | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Early battles in the lands of Thra | — |
| Recruitment | New allies join the squad | — |
| Customization | Jobs assigned, equipment outfitted | — |
| Total | Turn-based campaign battles | 80 |
| Beyond the series | New playable characters, stories, environments | — |
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