The Heroic Legend of Eagarlnia Preview

The Heroic Legend of Eagarlnia is a tactical strategy game where you build your own nation, conquering neighbouring settlements in a gambit to become the reigning monarch of the land. It’s got an interesting premise but is mechanically confusing and jarring at times to the point of aimlessness.

Conceptually the game is like Civilization, and your typical 4X games within this genre, start with a small settlement and slowly expanding it via conquest. Whereas other games will have multiple different resources to manage, Eagarlnia is focused solely on money and heroes management.

The heroes act like your working population they: improve your military, develop and fortify your settlements, perform espionage and sabotage enemy towns. The focus itself is interesting and easy to understand, making this potentially a great gateway game into the 4X genre for new players. Except, there’s a lot of other systems that bog it down. At times, you’ll feel like it’s drawing cards from a deck, but you never made the deck yourself and you’re in a tournament. Good luck, champ.

I've seen enough Anime to know that they're the villain.

The tutorial itself is fine, but it does very little to explain how each of the different systems work/integrate with each other. With the emphasis on searching for heroes, the game has multiple ways of recruiting them. The heroes are the mitochondria of the gamek, for a lack of a better analogy. Like Civilization, they're the population of a city that enables you to do things. Everything you want to do is dependent on them, gold being the fuel that keeps everything running. The goal is very much a balance between investing into heroes by buying equipment, and investing them into your settlements to level them up. Gain extra favour from your populace, fortify the walls, or invest into the city for more gold, the game doesn’t force your hand into fixed choices. In order to get more heroes, you effectively have to run the RNG machine of having a hero search for a hero or by using heroes to recruit other heroes from rival factions.

In theory, it’s great, there are options of getting people, but the game doesn’t make it clear on doing X gives Y with the RNG aspect feeling like some unknown judge saying you’re this far from Z metric. As an example, you send a hero to search in a settlement and at the start of the next turn you get something in return: nothing, gold, item, or a hero to recruit. It feels entirely random, so you throw more heroes into it in the hopes you get more heroes except it seems like there’s a cap on how many you can get? The question being, how come the enemy AI faction has more heroes than me? Is it because they got luckier? Or is it that they’re cheating to get the upper hand?

Beyond the city development, there’s also the issue of the combat itself being a mess of sorts where it’s a case of the combat real-time with cooldown based special moves that a hero can use. Granted, at the time of writing it was added in the latest update, so it still needs some level of polishing. It’s borderline too fast and hectic, but at the same point too slow. If the combat had half time/0.5x speed, that’d make it more manageable. It’s a chaotic mess of many moving pieces on a board but without the strategic or tactical prowess to turn a losing battle into a new one. It becomes a confusing mess of throwing things at the wall in the hopes of finding something that works. For example, there isn’t a clear way of forcing/changing engagements, and with how everything moves and then stops whenever a hero does their special move, the results range from painful loss or confused victory of “how did I win this battle exactly?”.

At least winter isn't soon.

The art style is fine and it has its charm, but it lacks a real cohesion to tie everything together. Having looked at their updates and how everything’s progressed, it’s definitely something that’s in active development and things feel like they’re moving at a steady pace. But is it a game that’s recommendable in its current state at version 0.09? If the concept of the game is interesting for sure. This game is a diamond in the rough that just needs polishing. If the devs are adding more features though, there’s certainly a fear of feature creep making the game even harder for new players into the genre.