Elven Legacy

Following on from a preview of this game done by another reviewer, I got the opportunity to play the full game. Elven Legacy is a turn based strategy game that will continuously challenge you. The further you go with the game, you will notice the rapidly increasing difficulty. But does this make it a solid game for genre veterans or is it too generic to earn your money?

One of the first things I'll mention which I was unaware of until I had done a little research into the game, is that it is actually a sequel to another game called Fantasy Wars. I've neither played nor heard of this game, but if you have played the aforementioned Fantasy Wars, from what I gather, this is more of the same.

Turn based strategy games, for the most part, have a pretty hardcore audience and the same is true here. The game begins simply enough, showing you a cut-scene and briefly explaining what's going on and what you are going to have to do. A human mage has stolen some Elven spells that were never meant to be used; you have to stop them from doing so. From here you are thrown straight into your first mission and that's my first problem.

Mission time comes and you start off with your two main characters and a couple of (what I assumed would be) expendable infantry units. As it's a turn based affair, you have two choices for each unit; attack or move and you can do so in any order. Being the first level, I wrongly assumed it would be an easy training mission. I marched my most powerful unit to the first enemy I saw, an enemy archer unit, and killed it – but not without losing most of my units health in the process. There was never any accurate explanation of the battle system; I'm used to starting a training level in these types of games and going through the "what's what" of battle, but there's no such thing here.

After narrowly making my way through the first level, I noticed I had earned a bronze trophy. These trophies are awarded based on how many turns it takes you to complete a level and needless to say my entire time with the game resulted in not a single gold medal. While this could be seen as a good thing for turn based strategy veterans, someone who only dabbles in the genre is likely to give up pretty quickly as the game soon gets punishingly difficult. This seems to have been a change of pace, as the preview of the game mentioned its friendliness to new comers.

Once you are used to the controls and the combat the game can become pretty enjoyable. You'll find yourself taking your time, not rushing from one end of the map to the other, carefully plotting your moves trying to get a better trophy and keep your units alive. Once you keep your units alive long enough and kill enough with them, you are given the chance to level them up, granting them extra armour or more powerful weapons and the like. However if these units are killed, all upgrades go with them so you will be trying to keep all units alive, which adds to the strategic planning of battles.

When you are in game, you are given a basic top down view of your units on the map and this is what you'll be seeing most of the time. However once you get units into battle, if you score a critical on the enemy you will receive a small scene showing your units attacking and destroying the enemy. These can be pretty entertaining, especially seeing your main Elven Archer unleash a glowing arrow bolt into a group of enemies and watching them all flying through the air with the impact of the bolt.

Graphically the game holds its ground pretty well. It looks impressive for a turn based strategy game. The backgrounds deserve a mention as they have a good amount of detail littered throughout for the most part. Character models, however, aren't shown the same kind of love and you will notice quickly how generic most of the infantry units look. I know in most strategy games, infantry units look alike, but it's a bit much when they look like they could have came straight out of The Lord of the Rings with no original thought. On a positive note though, the armour most special units wear is pretty impressive, there's good design on all units armour be it a friendly or enemy unit.

The game also has a good sound throughout. The game’s music sweeps up to epic during battle as would be expected, the voice acting, while nothing special, is acceptable (although note this game is a Russian import, so English voice acting wasn't first dubbed) and the sound effects do the job well enough.

The game also has your basic online modes with skirmishes against other players forming the basis of online play. These are good time killers but not the type of game I can see people playing many years down the line like certain other strategy games.

As I mentioned earlier, the units can seem generic and that's a problem the whole game has. While the sound may be good, the graphics at times impressive and the story decent enough, the problem is it's all been done too many times before. It's your typical fantasy fare with nothing spectacularly original on offer. If you are after a new turn based strategy game, you could do much worse than Elven Legacy, but the problem is, other than the difficulty level as you progress, you may feel like you've done it all before.