Nemesis: Lockdown

I brought it out because I could not be bothered to set up Darkest Dungeon again and, naturally, the mage was missing for RPG night again. I also wanted to see what changed compared with the first Nemesis. My first impression was positive: Lockdown feels more streamlined and, thankfully, it does not throw some first-room insta-death nonsense at you. A small victory for anyone who would like to actually play before dying.

At the table, it is still Nemesis: a survival game with aliens, where the threat is not merely decorative and your decisions carry weight. The flow here felt smoother to me than in the first one, making it easier to get into the mood without some clumsy early shock cutting you off.

Its interaction with the visitors did not win me over to the same extent, though. The fact that they automatically hand out serious wounds makes the game drag even more, and that is exactly the kind of pressure I did not find particularly fun. On top of that, several elements do not scale properly with the player count, so the experience does not always keep the same balance depending on how many people are at the table.

I am not going to complain too much: Lockdown has its fun and it is a good time, just not something I would want to gorge on. In the end, I prefer the original, and I definitely prefer the basic aliens or the carnivores. The visitors here left me a little disappointed; I understand the designers had to do something to make them distinct from the other races, but for me that difference comes at the expense of pace.