The Astonishing Game

I'll be straight with you: I came into this one as an outsider to the Dream Theater orbit, and what I found is a game that makes a lot more sense if you're already a card-carrying prog-metal fan than if you're just hunting for a solid turn-based strategy fix. The Astonishing Game is a digital board game adaptation of Dream Theater's two-disc concept album of the same name, and the IP is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The core loop has a chess-like structure to it. You summon units using a resource called "motivation" (think mana), capture boost tiles across a grid arena to grow your motivation pool, and race to destroy three of your opponent's camps on the far side of the board. The two playable factions, the Ravenskill Rebel Militia and the Great Northern Empire of the Americas, each come with their own unit roster: the resistance fields guitarists, keyboardists, and dancers, while the empire counters with judges and enforcers. That asymmetry sounds interesting on paper, but in practice the unit differentiation is shallow. Stats are surface-deep, the AI in single-player offers limited resistance, and the six story missions per faction can be cleared without much trouble. Critics at launch called out the repetitive gameplay directly, and that critique holds. The two-faction campaign structure does add some replay incentive since you need to complete both sides to see the full story, but whether that story is worth your time depends entirely on your relationship to the source album. Where the game earns genuine points is in its presentation for fans. The soundtrack pulls instrumental sections from The Astonishing that are otherwise unavailable outside live shows, and the video artwork sourced from Dream Theater's world tour is a legitimate exclusive. If you sank time into that double album and want to inhabit its world for a few hours, those hooks are real. The local pass-and-play PVP and cross-platform online multiplayer round out the package reasonably well for a game of this scale, though the online player pool has always been thin given the niche audience. No in-app purchases and a flat one-time cost at least keeps the value proposition clean. The issues critics flagged at launch, thin content, some UI bugs, and gameplay that struggles to justify itself outside the IP, were never fully resolved by updates. Steam's small user base sits at a respectable approval rating for what it is, but twenty-three reviews is not a confidence-inspiring sample. This is a game for Dream Theater diehards who want to spend more time in the universe of The Astonishing. For everyone else, the tactical depth just is not here to sustain interest once the novelty of the setting wears off. Fred, Scout Team