It Does Black Legend Manage To Fight Against The Dying Of The Light ?
Little doubt that comparisons to bloodborne and X-COM are inevitable with black legend in many ways. The belgian-based developer rises to that lofty comparison. Unfortunately at least on switch the game is plagued with more than just a maddening disease infecting the minds of any within.
Is this destined to succumb to the fog?
Let's find out, i am his instruments the city state of grant has long been a haven of sorts for those within separate from the two warring factions.
This high walled city enjoyed relative peace that's until it became the focus of them and with their forces bearing down on either side of the city from two different directions.
Only one option remained not running away or fleeing packing your lives into bags. Heading for the hills no that would that would be silly not when there's a stranger and renowned alchemist who's turned up randomly at the city with the cracking idea of filling the streets with toxic gas.
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Offering the locals a vaccine and then opening the gates to the enemies. They succumb and yeah the plan wasn't great was it. Anyway that's what they go for and this then in turn sends them insane and drives away the vast majority of their attackers result the plan was not without its less.
Obvious flaws though and as you progress through the story, you'll discover the true extent and fallout and learn more about the main characters as far as gameplay and controls.
You begin the game by designing your own character this being the new mercenary entering the city of grant and it's not long before the tasks begin to roll in much of the game is focused around its interesting take on turn-based combat while you can move freely around the city.
Enemies will be patrolling the areas replete with vision cones this gives you the option to avoid combat altogether by staying out of them. Once spotted combat prep begins during that phase. You can place select and move your units about within a predefined area.
Considering things like the elevation, you place them if they're arranged or the available space that you'll have to move. If they're melee classes then pressing the x button, begins the battle or at least. It's supposed to begin the battle make sure you stick around to the visuals and performance segment as i have a few things to talk about.
When we get there the turn-based battles initially seem quite standard fair. However there's a mechanic at play that makes it unique. But also as is so often the case is woefully underexplained to the player.
Essentially different attacks, have different alchemical properties linked to four different colors this is loosely based on the 17th century idea of humors known as humorism. But what it means in combat is that if you apply two adjacent ones the space between becomes a different color.
So for example red and black are next to each other in this area and
you can stack three of each different type. When you're ready the right hand
side of your screen and these are controlled with the rz and lz buttons allow
you to perform a catalyzing attack.
This essentially triggers those humors. So, if you have those adjacent pairs with the middle area highlighted. It will trigger extra damage for each one. You've got essentially stacking that damage once you've got your head around it it's actually a really ingenious system.
It means that you can get out some really tricky fights by focusing on stacking the correct coloured humours with other party members depending on the class that each party member has. They'll have the ability to stack different humors on the enemy. Before then one of you catalyzes those attacks doing massive amounts of damage.
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You could in theory totally ignore this system just concentrating on normal attacks. But later in the game when fights get much tougher it becomes essential to rely on it and it's probably my favorite part. One of the biggest parts of the game what's interesting about it as well is that the enemies do the same to you.
You'll receive damage and think to yourself hey that wasn't too bad. But what they've actually been doing is stacking those humors in adjacent areas making you vulnerable to when any enemy comes along and does a catalyzing attack other things that you have to think about are the directions that your players are facing at the end of each turn.
You can choose which direction. You're facing to hopefully ensure you don't get flanked or even worse backstabbed. Which is something you'll constantly be thinking about yourself as the damage from these rear or side attacks is much greater running parallel to this interesting mechanic is the quick switchable class based system.
As you play through the game, your characters will unlock several classes. Which you can change at any time. Each class has its own unique abilities as well as passive abilities. But once an ability has been unlocked by a class then you can essentially multi-spec other classes meaning.
You can take an ability from them as. It's been learned and use it within say a rogue class this allows for players willing to invest time to create a party of up to four who will all complement. Each other when applying those different attacks to get the most damage and as a system on its own it's so well done.
But so many people will never get that far. Because the tutorial aspects are just so weak. Black legend tracks all of your quests and side quests at the top of your screen on the left hand side and these can be dropped down or hidden by the press of the x button strangely.
It seemed like many of these menus didn't collate to the images of the
buttons. They showed with particularly strange implementations of the inventory
system. Where you could switch characters. You had to press the x button to do
it, rather than up and down on the left stick.
There are a lot of annoying little quirks that could so easily have been taken out of the game a prime example is moving about the area, looking for treasure and loot. When you've killed an enemy, their body will flash and sparkle showing you any loot that's.
When just exploring with the nature of the visuals and how grainy they are it's incredibly difficult to see what can be interacted with and what can't. It's not helped by a camera that feels like. It's working against you a lot of the time while it's only the right stick moving it left and right up and down there will be low hanging trees that block your vision or it'll get stuck.
Clip into a wall and it seems the developers were aware of this as they do allow you to shift to an overhead camera. It never feels truly intuitive and more of an afterthought just to save people that were getting frustrated as in the default view.
Sometimes in combat selecting enemies or moving to do certain attacks can feel overly fiddly trawling. Through the menus to find your medicine only to try and use it and then it sends you back to the first page. For you to have to scroll all the way down again, use it again, and just repeat this cycle really smack of a lack of testing time
or at least not the greatest feedback from those doing the testing. You'll move with the left stick and rather than have a dedicated sprint button you have to click the left stick in to get the character to sprint. But there's no real change in animation or any visual indication that you're sprinting and the difference is so slight. It doesn't feel good and it makes it look a little bit unpolished.
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But then there's my biggest peeve in this game and it's the lack of any sort of map. When did it become okay to have a large area in any game. A massive area that you have to go backwards and forwards left and right in and have zero way of navigating using a mapping system.
There are street posts which point you north, east, south, and west. If that was a gameplay design, it was a poor one. Because it's just not fun. doing that as it stands right. The controls were okay, but the clipping camera and the terrible menu controls as well as some of the bugs. The visuals performance and audio at first sight the game, looks reasonably attractive in a drab 17th century pseudo european city type of way.
However it is filled with bugs on the nintendo switch at the moment and i wasn't overly optimistic when i see the build number was something like 0.02 or something. So here are the issues that i've experienced. So far in my playtime the camera has been almost entirely stuck beneath a tree.
The game refused to let me press the start button. So pressing the plus to get to the menu broke and it broke meaning i couldn't save my game had numerous visual bugs. So when climbing on top of boxes or to a higher platform the character will seemingly walk in the opposite direction only to spawn in the place where you put them.
As i say overall, i do like the atmospheric style they've gone for. I don't enjoy the animations and i think overall the system, they went for in terms of character animations is quite poor looking. But the architectural design and the world itself are pretty decent as far as audio and sound goes this also is a mixed. The soundtrack is lovely and the game has a brilliant melody that plays out for most of your time.
Unfortunately it falls down on its sound effects or lack there of attacks using a very large sword or firing a blunderbuss should be accompanied by an equally meaty sound. It's funny because all of my complaints really come down to a lack of polish and a feeling like the title isn't quite finished. They're mostly things that can be fixed and the core gameplay design here is on point it suffers so much though as a result of the things i've mentioned.
Overall visuals and performance then well with the bugs. The sound is nice. They just need to work on the sound effects as it's a really nice touch for an indie to have a fully voice acted cast. Action points are used to perform attacks and abilities movement will let you move and yes some of them are a little bit wonky.
There's a touch of cheese going on. Overall it's quite an enjoyable vocal cast. Black legend will set you back 24 pounds 99 or your regional equivalent which as far as indies go is quite a premium price. Does it do enough to justify that well no as you know we always go back and revisit games that get patches.
I would strongly urge the developers to look at the issues that i've
mentioned as most of them would be quite easy to resolve in a patch, make a
toggle button for the run, fix the camera height, fix the save game issues and
fix the menu navigation.
Actually that's quite a big patch isn't it still is a shame. I actually enjoy the game. As it stands right now on nintendo switch, unfortunately black legend just isn't there yet. As i've said i'll make sure i revisit it after the first couple of patches.
We've seen it with games like pine where the developer knew there were big issues. Took it away, worked on it extensively and now pine is a fantastic game that i'd recommend. I know if they do the same here, there is a great game underneath. Just raring to come out as it stands though.
