This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the Approaching Storm custom campaign by Kristofer Bengtsson for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In The Approaching Storm, the investigators are asked by Professor Armitage to help with an investigation - and soon get sucked into a conspiracy where they have to prevent Baal, an ancient evil with control over flies and filth from reawakening.
Normally, these reviews follow a pretty standard structure, going over things in order - story, mechanics, specific scenarios, etc. This has to be broken for The Approaching Storm, due to its context. This campaign was one of the first custom campaigns released - it came out when The Forgotten Age was still being released - and it shows. There's all sorts of things that modern campaigns just don't do, for better and worse. The act of designing campaigns wasn't as well tred at this point - custom content designers were still trying to figure out what worked, and what didn't. Lots of locations don't have text at all, one scenario has a single, massive agenda card, encounter sets are reused heavily from Dunwich, and other campaigns are referenced within the story. All of this just isn't how things are done anymore. And often - that's for a reason.
How it plays really has to be the most important point of this review, because the answer is extremely rough. There are all sorts of test you must pass, sometimes repeatedly, to have a chance of winning scenarios. Those tests are often Agility and Willpower tests, which you may be less likely to be boosted high. The idea that a scenario must be reasonably completable by any investigator just doesn't exist. It's entirely possible you'll hit a dead end, and simply be unable to proceed - even if teh first scenario requires Agility 3 or 4 tests to just engage the final enemy, and if they take too much damage in one phase, they'll move away! This level of frustration nearly made me quit playing the campaign multiple times - and while I'm glad I went through with beating it, I can't blame anyone for deciding that it simply isn't worth the effort. This campaign requires things from your deckbuilding that no other campaign ask of you, and not in a particularly interesting way. What good from the campaign comes from that in the end, Arkham Horror the Card Game is a pretty fun game. When the campaign is working, it's doing so with pretty basic implementation of ideas, but often setting up scenarios just slightly different enough from familiar set-ups to be interesting. When it's not working, it's absolutely stonewalling any progress, preventing you from playing. That in-between area, where the game is absolutely slamming you into the ground, but you're managing to somehow still move forward, is where the most fun is. Sometimes, the campaign will ask you to do something you know is unfair, and leave you feeling good for beating it... hopefully.
And that's what playing the campaign or not comes down to. The campaign certainly isn't good, although it certain has a few neat ideas and notable events that end up being fun. Too often, not much is happening - there's an entire scenario that feels like it would have been a single Act in any other campaign. But for all the complaints, the mechanics are at least fairly clear - there's no bizarre, impossible to understand text or rules that don't make any sense. It is, in that sense, playable. However, I wouldn't recommend playing it unless you were driven by curiousity. What good parts the campaign have don't make up for the sheer frustration of some of the poorly thought out mechanics. However, if you do have that curiousity, you may find The Approaching Storm fascinating. It's a fascinating look at what custom campaigns were like, back before the standards are raised. Just be prepared to struggle with the mechanics.
It all has to come down to these mechanics as well. The story in The Approaching Storm is like Dunwich, but even lighter. There are places to go, things to do, and you'll get two parargaphs of text - if that - and you'll be happy. It doesn't need to be in depth or detailed, this is early Arkham, and getting to the game is what matters. It's notable at least how it wants to integrate its plot with the early campaigns, especially by using Professor Armitage. There's not really a lot to say here though - there's not a true story, but it's not obtrusive, which is what matters.
The Approaching Storm is an interesting historical artifact - it's not worth playing on its own, but for those who have seen lots of Arkham Horror, it's a fun look at early thoughts on how custom campaigns could have been. Just get ready for it to feel very, very unfair.
More on The Approaching Storm:
The Approaching Storm: Spoiler-Light Review