Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics — unlike the brilliant Netflix show it was made to market — is tough to recommend.

Not because it’s bad. It’s not! It’s a solid, though unspectacular, turn-based strategy RPG. With a troop of Muppet-y Gelflings by your side, you’ll battle through a version of the show’s storyline, but beefed up with a ton of extra fights, because there really are not that many fights in the show, I gotta tell ya. You’ll revisit a handful of locations seen in the show, and travel to new ones created for the game. Remember the Gobbles, the hungry mushroom blanket that devoured a certain captain of the guard? They’re here. Remember the Skeksis’ carriages, propelled by wheels made of giant carapacial insects? A tense early battle uses one as a backdrop. Remember the baby Arathim that took control of hundreds of Gelfling, abducting them into the Ascendancy? They’re here, too.

Didn’t understand any of that? Yeah, that’s the problem. Age of Resistance Tactics harkens back to an earlier era of licensed games in that it has no interest in explaining anything to anyone. Over the past decade-and-a-half, branded tie-ins like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Rocksteady’s Arkham games, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Marvel’s Spider-Man and many more have managed to capture the vibes of their source material, while still succeeding as games in their own right. Even if you had never seen a Batman movie or read a Batman comic, Rocksteady was interested in bringing you along for the ride.

Age of Resistance Tactics, though, adopts the model that dominated the early ‘00s. Remember when every intellectual property, no matter how seemingly insignificant or ill-fitting, got a video game tie-in? CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Open Season, Aquaman, Over the Hedge, the surfer Kelly Slater; all of them got games in the early ‘00s. What I remember most about this era of licensed games — besides that they were almost always bad — was that their levels were tied together with the most tenuous strands of story. At best, they let you relive the greatest hits of the property in question. But, they weren’t often interested in actually telling the story through an interactive medium. Mostly they just wanted to remind you of the thing you liked.

Age of Resistance Tactics is better than most of those games. But, its approach to storytelling is similar. The narrative presented here will be unintelligible for anyone who hasn’t watched the show, and maybe even to those who haven’t watched it recently. A brief slideshow of concept art and unvoiced dialogue attempts to introduce the story and similar slideshows pop up occasionally throughout. They don’t actually function as a means of storytelling; they’re bereft of character development and loaded with Proper Nouns. It feels strange that a show as sumptuously realized as Dark Crystal would get a game so clearly compromised by budget. Remember that thing you saw in the show that was jaw-droppingly impressive? Here’s some art of that moment with PowerPoint text boxes of dialogue. I don’t fault the developers at BonusXP ( who also handled last year’s Stranger Things 3: The Game). Not at all. The problems with Age of Resistance Tactics indicate a lack of cash, not a lack of talent or imagination.

In fact, Bonus XP’s care for the property comes through pretty clearly once you actually start playing the thing. The graphics, smartly, don’t attempt to replicate the bruisy, oozy grandeur of the show, but instead opt for a toy-like cartoonishness. While the show is, at times, uncomfortably earthy, Age of Resistance Tactics looks like Toys for Bob started crafting miniatures and dioramas immediately after finishing up the Spyro remasters. Sandy deserts, marshy woodlands, castle dungeons: the settings that defined the show receive new life here. And the characters that were portrayed by puppets in the show take on an almost action figure-like plasticine quality here. BonusXP has done a fantastic job translating the show’s tactile aesthetic to computer-rendered images.

That cozy look is pretty frequently hampered, though, by a choppy framerate. Despite playing on a beefy gaming laptop that can run Control and Jedi: Fallen Order without issue, Age of Resistance Tactics was frequently choppy. The framerate was especially bad when environmental effects hit the battlefield. The camera often struggled to keep up, especially in a late-game fight beset by green poison clouds, and multiple battles in the sandstorm-y desert The game is releasing simultaneously on PS4, Xbox One and Switch, as well, and if I had problems on PC, I suspect console players may deal with similar issues.

The technical hiccups are annoying, but they aren’t the dealbreaker they would be for a twitchier game. Age of Resistance Tactics is a methodical RPG, and the framerate issues never prevented me from winning a fight or following the action. And that action is, generally, pretty good. Each character can take on a primary and a secondary job, and each unlocks new abilities. As you gain experience, you can specialize. A Soldier can become a Paladin. The support-focused Mender, gets promoted to Bramble Sage. Dump points into Paladin and Thief and eventually, those skills can intersect to make you a Grave Dancer.

Strange names belie solid tactics. One character’s ability may serve as primer for another’s detonation. For example, by equipping one Gelfling with the ability to target an opponent, I allowed several of my other characters to deal significantly higher amounts of damage when they used complementary attacks. Early on, after losing a boss fight repeatedly, I analyzed each of my character’s abilities until I found one that could ameliorate status effects, then steamrolled to victory. There’s a lot going on under the hood and, as a tactics fan, I enjoyed finding the right combinations for the occasional tough encounter.

Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics doesn’t put its best foot forward. As the game representation of a fantastic series, it fails to *Skeksi voice* give us its very essence. But, if you can get past the PowerPoint presentation and poorly told version of the show’s story, there’s enough here to keep tactics fans busy between Fire Emblems and XCOMs.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics review code for PC provided by the publisher.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.