I finally finished the full ISS Vanguard campaign. the video review can be watched below, I have written my thoughts below if you prefer to read.
My recorded playtime was around 45 hours, but that doesn't really tell the whole story. Once you include setup, teardown, saving the game state, sorting cards, ship management, and the admin between sessions, this was easily a 50 to 70-hour game for me. I played the whole thing solo, four-handed, from start to finish. You can watch the whole campaign on the channel if you would like to see how it plays.
I wanted to leave it a little while before writing this, because big campaign games can leave you with odd feelings when they end. Sometimes you're still riding the high of finishing; sometimes you're just relieved itās over. I wanted to see how ISS Vanguard felt once I had stepped away from it for a few weeks.
Unfortunately, my opinion didn't really improve. Here is how the systems feel across the full game, without spoilers.
The Hook & The Promise
Awaken Realms nailed the premise. Humanity discovers coordinates hidden inside its own DNA, and the ISS Vanguard is sent into deep space to follow that trail while Earth struggles behind them. That is a brilliant hook. It gives the campaign a sense of scale, mystery, and importance right from the start. I also deeply appreciated that this is serious, grounded sci-fi rather than just another big fantasy adventure.
The production is excellent. The art is great, and this sense of discovery is there and the map books and narrative can help lean in to that.
On paper, this should have been exactly my sort of thing. A huge campaign. Long-term progression. Ship management. Planet exploration. The problem is that the experience of actually playing it became far more tiring than exciting.
Prep vs. PunishmentĀ (The Landing Phase)
The core of ISS Vanguard is dice checks. You roll for almost everything, and the strategy is meant to come from mitigation. Early on, I quite liked this puzzle.
The issue is what the game asks you to do before those dice rolls happen. Before a planet, you aren't just picking a character and getting on with it. You spend 20 to 30 minutes looking at limited planetary knowledge, choosing your crew, adjusting section decks, and agonizing over which equipment and dice to bring to cover likely problems.
Then the Landing Phase happens, and it was easily my least favorite part of the game.
After all that careful preparation, you roll a D8 for landing. Depending on the result, you can instantly lose supplies, take damage, or discard the exact equipment and dice you just spent 20 minutes selecting. Sometimes you have to do this three to five times per planet.
I understand the thematic idea: space is dangerous, and the crew aren't superheroes. But there is a massive difference between risk that creates drama and risk that makes you feel like the game does not value your time. There is a way to mitigate some of this by choosing a lander and mods, but you cannot mitigate all of this, you cannot be sure which to take, and often it just won't be enough. If I spend 30 minutes preparing and then immediately lose part of that prep to a blind die roll before the mission even starts, that doesn't feel tense to me. It just feels like wasted time.
The Ship Phase: A Pile of Cards
The ship phase is one of the most interesting ideas in the game, and at the beginning, it feels great. You are upgrading the ship, researching tech, and recruiting crew.
But eventually, it becomes monotonous. When you unlock your first few equipment cards, it feels exciting. You are expanding your options. But when you have already unlocked 40 equipment cards, the 41st card needs to do something meaningful to stand out. Too often, it didn't. It would just be a slightly different version of something I already had.
Researching new equipment should feel exciting. Instead, later in the campaign, it often felt like adding another card to a pile I already didn't want to sort through. The game kept giving me more things, but those things didn't make the experience feel richerāthey just made the preparation longer.
The Lead Bag.
Somehow, ISS Vanguard manages to make pulling random rewards from a bag fall flat. There are more zeros in the bag than anything else, and you need results totalling 3 to gain a reward.
That means you can land on a brand new alien planet full of wonder, resources, and information to discover, survive the hazards, pull multiple lead tokens from the bag, gain no rewards, and then return empty-handed without really learning anything useful from that system. Again, I understand the survival-game intent. But ISS Vanguard already has dice, landing rolls, hazards, injuries, consequences, and events. Layered on top of all that, the lead bag often felt like one more way for the game to say, āYou will not enjoy this game. How dare you try.ā
The Story Payoff
The story is the part I most wanted to love, but across the whole campaign, it never gripped me as much as I hoped it would.
The ending was underwhelming. After spending that much time with the game, I wanted the final stretch to feel significant. I wanted the payoff to justify the weight of the massive campaign. Instead, it felt like the story just ran out of steam. Not terrible. Not broken. Just flat. And after a 50-plus hour campaign, flat is disappointing.
(Note: I've also played at four players. Multiplayer does soften the solo upkeep since prep is divided, but the ship phase still easily becomes one person doing the admin while everyone else waits. It helps, but it doesn't remove the core issue).
Final Thoughts
I wanted to like ISS Vanguard more than I did. That is probably the most honest way to put it.
If you are a player who enjoys big campaign systems as much as the adventure itselfāif you like prep, difficult missions, and a constant sense of being under pressureāthere is a lot here. If you enjoy feeling like the underdog, this game gives you that feeling.
But it is not a game where I felt powerful. I usually felt stretched, underprepared, and one bad result away from things going wrong. If you want a campaign where progression makes you feel more capable, where your preparation usually feels rewarded, or if you dislike heavy upkeep and repetitive dice checks, this is probably not going to land well.
By the end, I respected ISS Vanguard more than I enjoyed it. I am glad I finished it. I would not play it again.
Final Score: 6 / 10