Elven Legacy

Elves have had a mixed reception in the past, from the higher beings in the Lord Of The Rings stories to Evil Glamour creatures in Terry Pratchett books. Not to mention their spooky obsession with Christmas, so With all of these interpretations I'm not quite sure where I stand with Elves in general.

This game has it's own take again; this time they're an extremely proud but surprisingly angry group of peeps. The plot revolves around a mage who has uncovered dark powers that the Elves were guarding and now they need him stopped. Sagittel, an experienced Elven general, takes a bunch of raw recruits along with him to stop the mage...and hilarity ensures...

Ok, well not hilarity, but you should get the idea. There are a couple of attempts at humour but overall I think the story takes the game a little too seriously. Sagittel himself is a little too proud and constantly argues with every other character in the game. This at least means he's consistent as a character, but tedious and predictable to watch.

The gameplay consists of turn based strategy with a hexagonal based battlefield, the kind found in most turn based strategy games. It works well, but then again this is tried and tested stuff. Something I did appreciate was the map controls which I found intuitive and easy to use and didn't interrupt my limited tactical train of thought! Left click on unit, left click on destination, left click on enemy to attack; It sounds simple but some strategy games can really beat around the bush with it all. I did miss having a mini map though when my units were more spread out.

It reminded me very much of my table top games I played in my teenage years. In fact I think I've always preferred turn based battles to real time strategy because of that. I somehow find comfort in being able to move and fire before the enemy has even spotted my units. I'm being generous because, as usual, I'm pretty rubbish at anything that requires tactical thinking.

And that's a total understatement! In short: I'm Rubbish.

That doesn't mean Elven Legacy wasn't enjoyable for me, far from it and contrary to most strategy games I've played, I felt really drawn into the story! The missions all had similar goals, which is almost unavoidable I suppose, the designs were all unique and related perfectly to the situation. But each one really felt like a small part of the journey described in the talky bits between missions. This was mostly due to the detail of the landscape consistently looking like an advanced tabletop war game. It looked especially good during levels where you approach obstacles such as walls and fortresses to conquer.

Graphically there are not massive poly counts or the latest in shaders going on. This wasn't such a problem, I've always been more for playability rather than over compensation with graphics. The "everything must be brown" approach wasn't used here, which I was glad about as I like to recognise the units instantly rather than having to check by clicking or zooming in.