Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom

6.0
Average

Gameplay	6.5	"Think twice unless it's on sale and you've nothing else to do."
Graphics	6.0
Sound	7.0
Value	7.0

By Alan Bell

The basic premise is simple: take control of your choice of hero (a warrior, caster or rogue-type) and defend all that is just against the overwhelming forces of evil. You must destroy endless waves of bad guys as you attempt to gain levels, upgrade your equipment and advance the story. Bad guys get badder, weapons kick ever increasing amounts of ass and your spells get so big they look like they could consume the entire world.

There are a couple of twists on the classic formula, the most notable of which is the combo system. In addition to your ever increasing arsenal of spells (even the warrior class is blessed with a series of spells, including area of effect damage spells), you can chain your fast and slow attacks (think: X and square buttons) into devastating combos. They’re pretty easy to pull off but are a definite improvement on the “spam X” mechanic of most previous action RPG games. Crucially, you access more combos as you level, each of which is increasingly more devastating and at the same time more challenging to execute. Nice!

The “loot” (stuff you collect as you go, used to improve your character) system is an interesting one. In addition to villains occasionally dropping items which may be of use to you (it’s fairly rare, one piece every five to ten minutes or so), most enemies also leave behind one of three different-coloured orbs. Red ones restore health, blue ones restore energy/mana, and yellow ones form the game’s currency. You can use the yellow ones to purchase new items at the frequently discovered save locations spread all over each map.

Your inventory space is limited to five pieces of armour of each type (so, five helmets, five leg pieces, five shoulder pieces – etc) and there are no vendors (or non player characters that you can converse with at all) so discarding items soon becomes second nature. You don’t get new weapons either as drops or purchased via the save locations, however you can socket your weapon with four different types of gem: the effects of these gems is varied enough, leading to some variety in how your weapon works from player to player.

Armour items all have their own unique look and, in the screen where you equip them at least, they generally look pretty spiffy. However, you tend to play the game from a distance and from an angle which is largely looking down on your character, so you don’t tend to notice the cosmetic changes in your character as you progress. The cape used by the caster/mage class seems to be made of rubber and stretches like you’ve snagged it on something as you run.

Thanks to the mage’s spells being rather mana-hungry, most of the classes spend most of the time performing mana-free melee combos (there are no spell combos). Each set of animations is unique, however, so if you can get your head around your mage doing crazy melee moves (and very effectively at that), they do play (and look) fairly different in action.

The camera, in a word, sucks. It’s terrible. For some obscure reason, the artists/visual designers thought having lots of mid-level detail (trees, buildings, etc – stuff that appears between your character and the camera) would be a great idea - despite the camera’s complete and total lack of any ability to see through these objects. It’s also entirely manual. The net effect of this is that you spend a LOT of your time massaging the camera into a position which allows you to see even some of what’s going on. It’s really that bad. Playing the game multiplayer, where both players have the ability to control this camera… it’s a terrible combination which actually makes a terrible camera system worse than it is normally.

The cutscenes are a joke. They look like the kind of storyboard art that you expect people put together when planning the flow of a cinematic system. Well, in this case, it looks like the artists forgot to make the real thing and shipped these terrible placeholders in the final boxed product. They also judder in playback, like the PS3 is having trouble rendering these awful looking scenes. Maybe it’s embarrassed…

The story is extremely forgettable. Apparently the King has gone mad and no one noticed. You go to visit him to see if this rumour is true and find that it is! See, if I were to visit the beehive, and see these ten-foot-tall demons on guard, I wouldn’t need to get as far as Helen to determine the truth of the matter.

Visually the title is extremely bland. Sure the spells look pretty nifty and those trees you spend most of your time trying to peer through are nice enough, but this title, for the most part, really wouldn’t look out of place on an Xbox or PS2. This is living? This is lackluster, more like.

With a boring story, simplistic loot, no NPCs to interact with and gameplay which is essentially about running from enemy to enemy and pressing X and Square randomly, you’d think this was a pretty average game. You’d be right. There’s nothing to recommend this, particularly when you can play great games like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (a PS2 game) on your PS3 and it looks almost as good.

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