Frosthaven Review Summary

Highly positive initial reception: Players are highly impressed with the game's current state, especially considering it's in Early Access. They praise its graphics, sound, mechanics, and overall enjoyment, seeing great potential for its future development.

Superior board game adaptation: The game is lauded as an excellent and faithful digital adaptation of the board game, improving upon its predecessor, Gloomhaven, with cleaner interfaces, better inventory, and enhanced RPG elements, while retaining tactical depth.

Deeper tactical progression: Frosthaven Digital is praised for its tactical depth, deeper progression systems, and the increased importance of looting due to resource management.

Robust Early Access content: The Early Access version is noted for its substantial content and significant improvements over previous beta tests, including useful features like animation speed-up options.

Excellent multiplayer experience: Multiplayer functionality is fully operational and provides a highly enjoyable experience, especially when playing with friends.

Rampant Bugs & Instability: The game is plagued by numerous bugs, ranging from minor glitches to critical issues that prevent gameplay, cause crashes, or lead to frequent disconnections in multiplayer. This significantly hinders the player experience and stability.

Poor UI/UX Design: The user interface and experience are widely criticized for being unintuitive, cluttered, and inefficient. Issues include tiny fonts, confusing iconography, lack of essential tooltips, and excessive confirmation clicks, which collectively degrade usability.

Inadequate Tutorial & Onboarding: Players consistently report that the game's tutorial is severely lacking, making it difficult for newcomers to understand core mechanics, class complexities, and UI elements. This leads to a steep learning curve and frustration, especially for those unfamiliar with the board game.

Divergent Art Style & Feel: Many players feel the digital adaptation deviates too much from the original board game's aesthetic and feel. This includes changes in art style, character models, card layouts, and iconography, which can be jarring for fans of the physical game.

Difficulty & Balance Issues: Players report significant balance issues, making the game excessively difficult even on the easiest settings. Some character classes are particularly challenging to play, contributing to a frustrating experience.

Unique card system mechanics: The game features a unique card system where players select two cards per turn, one for movement and one for attacking. This system requires a learning curve and understanding to master, as it's different from typical card mechanics.

Player count affects difficulty: The game's difficulty and enemy count scale dynamically with the number of players. Playing with fewer characters, such as two, can lead to faster progression compared to a full four-hero party, as there are fewer enemies to contend with.

No custom house rules: The digital adaptation of the game strictly enforces rules, which means players cannot implement custom 'house rules' as they might in the physical board game version. This limits flexibility for players who prefer to modify gameplay.

Includes town-building feature: A significant feature of the game is the town-building mechanic, where players are responsible for constructing and developing their own town. This adds a strategic layer beyond combat.

Valuable resources everywhere: Players can find valuable resources like wood, pelts, metal, and potion ingredients in any pile within the game world. This encourages exploration and resource gathering as a core part of progression.

Slow loading times: Players report excessively long loading times, both at startup and between levels. This contributes to a slow and frustrating user experience.

FPS drops: Some players are experiencing noticeable frame rate drops, particularly in certain areas like the village phase, even on high-end systems. This can detract from the visual fluidity of the game.

High fan speed on launch: The game causes system fans to spin at maximum speed upon launch, indicating high resource usage or poor optimization. This can be concerning for hardware longevity and noise.

Resolution adjustment needed: Players are finding that the game does not automatically adjust to their native resolution, requiring manual adjustment. This is a minor inconvenience but affects initial setup.

Start with Gloomhaven first: Many players recommend starting with Gloomhaven or Jaws of the Lion, especially for newcomers, as they offer a more accessible entry point to the series. This game is seen as a good fit for those already familiar with the 'xHaven' universe.

Wait for future updates: Players generally advise waiting for further development and content updates before purchasing, especially if seeking a polished experience. There's a strong anticipation for the game's full release and future improvements.

Highly recommended by some: Despite its Early Access state, some players highly recommend the game, especially to those who enjoyed the first generation of the series.

More content eagerly awaited: Players are excited for and eagerly awaiting the addition of more content, particularly new heroes, to expand the gameplay experience.

Do not buy, refund quickly: A small cluster of reviews strongly advises against purchasing the game in its current state, suggesting players save their money or seek refunds. This could be part of a review-bombing effort.

Early Access, ongoing development needed: Players acknowledge the game is in Early Access and expect ongoing development. There's a clear desire for developers to continue fixing bugs, refining translations, and adding content to complete the experience.

High difficulty, steep learning curve: Many players find the game's learning curve steep and the overall difficulty high, especially for newcomers. A more comprehensive tutorial or a dedicated learning mode is suggested to ease new players into the mechanics.

Experienced players adapting strategies: Some players are experienced with similar tabletop games like Gloomhaven and are adapting their strategies, such as playing with fewer characters or on specific difficulties, to manage the game's challenges.

Desire for quality-of-life features: Players are requesting quality-of-life improvements, such as better UI for resource management and more intuitive ways to exit quests without resorting to force-quitting.

Settlement and character progression: Players are observing the progression of their settlement and characters, indicating engagement with the game's core progression systems.