Legend: Hand of God

I’ve played many computer RPGs in my time, some are combat based (such as Diablo) and some are detailed turn based epics that concentrate more on the roleplaying and adventure than the combat. There are a couple that stride the two formats ( Witcher being my favorite).

The Plot

OK, so the plot isn’t too detailed; you are a young warrior in the Order of Flame, who happens to be away being ‘initiated’ when an evil force kills all your colleagues in the order. Quite rightly, you’re not too happy and therefore you seek out revenge and the reason behind the attack.

Thus begins an epic quest to find the truth, involving a huge array of nasty monsters and evil humans to bash, kill and maim. Legend, is a hack and slash game, a bit like Diablo but with far more detailed graphics. Controls are very simple, click on an enemy, and hit him; click on an enemy and fire off a fireball at him.

Some Gripes

*gripe 1* - I found the combat to be troublesome at best. Quite often I found myself running around in a circle trying to click on the elusive monster – I almost expected some ‘Benny Hill’ music to be playing.

*gripe 2* - the manual is poor. It took me several hours to work out how to assign different spells to certain ‘mouse’ keys – it was good that I could use the ‘middle’ wheel key – but the manual should have been far more explicit on how to use the keys.

*gripe 3* - the game is challenging, and quite often you are overwhelmed with enemies – however, I found that all you had to do was kill a few – get killed yourself and then go back and finish off the bad guys (there’s no penalty for being killed) – when killed you are transported to a monolith with your Hit Points returned to max – there is no downside to being killed, aside from being moved!

Character Class

When you first start the game, you get to pick two out of five ‘schools’ in which to gain experience. This essentially gives you 10 different classes to chose. My advice, make sure you have a class with healing – there are not many ‘healing potions’ to be found, and as the game is predominately about killing a multitude of monsters, you’re going to need to be healed.

Movement

Like in Diablo, movement is achieved by pointing and clicking. This is fairly intuitive, however, the camera is severely limited, allowing you basically to zoom in and out – it really is very restrictive and makes movement, finding enemies and ‘caves’ etc very difficult at times. You do get used to it after a while, but in this day and age it is simply not good enough.

Fighting

Fighting is achieved by use of the mouse – essentially, for each style of fighting – ranged, hack or magic, you simply click on the target with the appropriate mouse button and voila!! It is simple, but perhaps a little bit too simple.

The game highlights the fact that each monster is unique and has it’s own fighting style, however this is very superficial as your character adapts automatically, and aside from some different animations, the end effect is the same. You really don’t choose what to do, or how to do it – aside from some of the special moves. It is impressive to look at, but that is about all.

Items and potions

Guess what – as you kill some bad guys they drop weapons and potions and armor. Most of this is better than yours, so pick it up and use it – or sell it. There are also some hidden stashes and some barrels treasure chests etc.

Ok so here’s the illogical bit – why would a bad guy stash some weapons that are likely to help in killing other bad guys? Surely they’d destroy them.

Merchants

As you move through the game you find several people to sell or buy items from. Generally this is easy, but if you want to by more than one of a particular item (such as a healing potion) it becomes a pain as you have to drag and drop one at a time!

Graphics

The graphics are generally good, although even with a dual core PC, with a 512MB graphics card, I found I had to reduce all the graphics options to get the game to run slowly – even in this mode, the game slows down when there are a lot of bad guys on the screen.

There are some nice touches, such as flying birds etc, but this simply adds to the atmosphere and doesn’t really add to the game play. I found it hard to find ‘exits’ occasionally, and was surprised there were not options to change the brightness etc of the game.

Sounds

The sound is generally good, although the voice acting is a little wooden. Ummm…not really much to say here about the sound…

Experience and leveling

Like many of these games, you gain experience as you go – you have limited things you can do when you level up. You can increase your stats, and also learn new spells and skills (or improve the spells and skills you already have). Very basic stuff really.

Summary

Overall, the game is adequate. The story does get better, but there is a lot of hacking and slaying between ‘quest’ parts. There are some sub-quests that add a little variety, but these are mainly a case of ‘fetching’ and item, or ‘saving’ someone. The makers seemed to want to give you some RPG elements, but not too much – they really got stuck in between and thus the game suffered.

My advice, if you want a hack and slash game with substance, then try ‘Witcher’. If you really must buy this one, then wait until it’s on discount.