For years, the first and last word in dungeon crawler board games was Descent. The original edition in 2005 set the standard for the genre, a coffin-sized box packed with plastic miniatures and dungeon tiles, promising a massive campaign, tactical combat, and streamlined RPG progression systems. Now Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent brings the series to PC and Mac, PS5, and XBox Series XS, as an original tactics RPG. I've played through the press preview demo, and found a game that is both fun to play and staggeringly generic.
If you know the board game series it's based on, that shouldn't be a surprise - Terrinoth is the most average fantasy setting in all of tabletop gaming. The dungeon crawler board game genre is already very formulaic - it is, after all, a stripped down RPG that amps up the tactical combat while dialling back the roleplaying to basically nothing - and Descent established a lot of those conventions.
The demo includes two dungeons, one of them a tutorial. You're in control of a party of adventurers - four at any one time, though you'll have a larger group to choose from - who move freely around a fairly large map, then swap to turn-based encounters.
The demo had limited environmental puzzles during exploration, which usually required a specific character to activate - someone strong to knock down a barricade, say - and there was some freedom in how I could instigate fights, though this is nowhere near the exploration-first freedom you'll find in Mutant: Year Zero or even XCOM 2.
They're fun fights, though! In the two demo dungeons (not pictured in this article - the screenshots are from more later locations still in development) every encounter was scripted to a specific location with interesting terrain, exploding barrels, vantage points to empower your ranged fighters, and optional objectives like keeping a trapped guard from being mauled by skeletons.
The main characters are absolute archetypes, with a tanky, aggro-pulling dragonborn fighter, a dwarf wizard with control spells, one ranged rogue, one melee rogue, and a cleric healer with some area of effect magic - and screenshots suggest there's a tiger person. There's an elemental damage and resistance system, though don't expect a Baldur's Gate 3 level of elemental interactions - the cleverest trick I was able to pull was lighting some magic braziers with fire spells instead of basic interactions when a scenario objective called for it.
The balance isn't there yet. The dwarf mage's fourth ability - which, thanks to a glitch in the demo, isn't named - is a ranged attack that freezes an enemy in place for a turn, and it's an absurdly powerful way to control enemy melee fighters.
The dragonborn's basic melee attack is almost universally outclassed by the shield bash, which can deal oodles of collateral damage by punting enemies off walls, into their neighbors, or over ledges. As punting enemies off walls and over ledges is one of my absolute favorite things to do in tactics RPGs, I'm loathe to call that bad design, exactly, but I expect the melee attack to get tuned a little.
If you've got a really low tolerance for clichés you can probably skip on this. If you don't mind clichés, I'll indulge in one myself - what I've played of Heroes of Descent feels like a band playing all the hits. Sure, it's nothing new - but there's a reason those are the hits.
Heroes of Descent is being developed by Artefacts Studio, who've carved out a niche making tactics RPGS: they're the team behind the good digital edition of beloved Warhammer 40k game Space Hulk, and the solidly successful comedy tactics RPG The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos. They're a very safe pair of hands, and the demo was sufficiently polished that the projected release window of "Q2 2026" seems achievable.
Did you play any of the editions of Descent? Which was your favorite? Or is there another dungeon crawler that you prefer? Come and chat in the Wargamer Discord community. And for a round up of all our best stories, make sure you're signed up to the weekly Wargamer newsletter.