I have loved Imperial Assault Skirmish since the game was released. I got another couple guys in my gaming group to buy in, and I've loved every minute of it. The campaign side has been a different story. I tried early on to start a campaign with my wife, but she hated it. I had played as the Imperials, and likely was a bit too aggressive in how I played them. She refused to play again after one of the missions I deployed a Nexu right on both of her characters and defeated them in a single blow. I have not given campaign much thought since.
This changed when FFG released the Legends of the Alliance App late this past year. Its a co-op style mode for campaign play, where the App will tell you how to deploy and when to activate enemy groups, but you're in charge of moving them and rolling their dice. You build the maps and move the figures around, with the app just helping guide whats going on. Enemy units get some differnt special abilities, and their surge abilities and priorities change as missions go on. My wife was enthusiastic to try this style of campaign, because she does enjoy playing games with me.
I'll first review the current campaign without giving spoilers, which I'll leave to after the jump in case folks haven't played yet. In short, this was a great intro campaign for the system. The difficulty on Normal seemed to be just right for our two person game, and I'm not certain how a Hard campaign would go with just two figures activating. There were some missions where there were a lot of Elite deployments out on the map and we struggled to kill them with our heroes (Dialla and Drokkata). Midway through the app updated to add units from all units in your collection, and I felt the difficulty took a bit of a jump there. Elite Jets are quite a bit scarier than a standard Elite Officer deployment that the game gave us several times early on. The missions were fun, and the text only side encounters were short and had enough options to keep us intrigued during these segues. The only real complaints I have are the item system and the overall campaign length. To address the length, it was just far too short. A handful of missions and I felt like I was just getting the hang of playing Drokkata, and the story was left a little bare. As to the equipment, we just never earned enough cash really to buy the good stuff. So I felt we were a little underpowered at different points of missions trying to gun down some of the more powerful units.
Overall I think it was a great first effort, and I hope FFG releases several more expanded campaigns shortly so we can keep playing.
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A bit more in depth about the campaign with some spoilers. You get 5 actual play through missions, with a text mission inbetween each. These text missions are a nice easy way quick way to gain allies or rewards. One was to rescue some rebel troopers from an ambushed CR90, while another got us Luke Skywalker. Another mission got us a couple of reward cards. These were nice interludes. They moved quickly with skill checks and the missions were short enough you weren't just reading pages and pages of text.
Of the 4 short missions, the first two we played we faced only core set enemies. The first was a standard endless waves mission, where you try to hold the Yavin base long enough for everyone to evacuate. Like in the standard campaign how long different actions take you to complete will determine different effects triggering. On Yavin the jungle heat caused strain, on another mission rocks fell and injured and strained units around it. Overall the missions I thought were of an appopriate difficulty, maybe a little on the tough side for our just two heroes. None were overly long, each with a couple of map tiles that got added as the mission went along and you explored the map. The 2nd mission has the crew of your transport getting captured. You have to search a bar for inofmration and find them. Straight forward and interesting since you needed to test a few different skills. With only two heroes it was tough to rescue the crew before too many things happened though. IG88 interrupted to attack Dialla while Drokkata was escorting our the first wave of hostage crew members.This misison dragged on since neither of us had enough fire power yet to quickly remove the likes of the riot troopers or eJets. The next several missions were investigating a possible leak and traitor. We guessed wrong on who was the traitor though, which essentially meant we were going to not be able to finish that mission before we had to face General Weiss. The final mission saw us captured by an ISD and trying to escape with the crew. It worked in the end, in part because we just ran past Darth Vader.
Sadly, there were no character specific mission like in the traditional campaign. We did not get Dialla a lightsaber, nor did we free and Wookie Slaves for Drokkata. It would have added so much more I think to have those missions, and I hope FFG adds them for future campaigns. It also hurt that we had such a limited selection of items between missions. 4 selections is ok, but with the starter weaposn barely denting a lot of enemy characters it would have bee nice to have a few extra choices.
I really do hope FFG adds some more campaigns soon, and lengthens them a few missions with some side quests for the characters.
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