A 2 Steam

Aarklash Legacy 

Sometimes a game just can't decide what it wants to be, which roll it's trying to fulfill at any given time and end up being a jack of all trades, master of none. That's Aarklash Legacy.

I am familiar with the fantasy world that this game takes place in. A french miniature wargame company named Rackham made a nice set of rules and some fantastic models for about a decade for a game called Confrontation - which took place on the world of Aarklash. Then they bought out, mismanaged and went defunct. It was sad thing to happen to a good company. During the last few years a lot of licences were given for the setting and Aarklash Legacy was the result of one of them.

As I said before this game just doesn't know what it wants to be. It's presented as a isometric party based action game - somewhere between Diablo and D&D rpg (Icewind Dale / Baldur's Gate). You control four heroes at any one time and as the game progresses you meet new characters that join your group and you can swap out heroes as you like. Each of the characters comes from one of the many races and factions in the game (humans, goblins, orcs, werewolves, undead, ect) and in cut scenes are presented with their own particular attitude and dialogue, including their relationships with other party members. While the voice acting is only just serviceable, the story based conversations are good. But sadly in a game with far to many things in it this is the one part that it could have had more of. For a game with a rich story background it's too sparse with the "character" of these heroes.

The main content of the game is wandering down "corridor" maps and having battles with the various factions that are aligned against your heroes. It's a mix between real time hack and slashing as you click and direct your heroes around and a pause system where you can queue up orders and special abilities, giving the heroes particular targets for when the need arises. The game gives you a huge amount of information for each of these battles, from enemy stats, ability color coding, spell casting timer wheels and so on. They first few fights you will spend a ton of time just digesting all the possible information you need to make educated tactics. And you will need them - these battles are hard and can turn on you fast (save often!). You will spend so much time in the pause screen the real time aspect of the game really starts to fade and I honestly think if they game had gone with turn based combat system it would have been far better - everything seems set up for it - but then it defaults to an action-rpg style.

And oh boy you better hope to enjoy the combat because there is a lot of it. This is where the game bogs down in my opinion. There are lots of different types of enemies that come in various combinations requiring your tactics to be flexible. Over and over and over again. And you can see it coming. Big room, oh that will be a mini-boss and support. Long corridor, look out for a large group of enemies to stall our progress. Does the path split ahead? Well their will be a group of enemies patrolling for sure. The large number of battles starts to drag and the tactical combinations start to run our and a grind sets in. In service of what? The huge skill tree that each hero has broken down into far to small delineations? The loot upgrade system that really want's to be like an RPG? But instead is just a collection of trinkets giving you a small percentage boost scattered here and there (even on the "epic" items). It just gets to be too many of these encounters and they get bland. By the end of Act 2 I was more or less done.

Fewer more bespoke encounters would have been far more impact full and interesting. The tools are there, an amazing variety of different enemies but other than act ending boss battles their is no soul to these fights. Combining crafted battles with more story and less grind would have done a huge service to Aarklash Legacy.

The game (especially act 2) is also rife with puzzles. Some of them are decent, some so easy they are only puzzles in the most basic sense. Some require thought, most of them can have the solution brute forced. Not sure why these are here other than to provide another content speed bump to slow player progression. They could have been better, or again if combined with combat encounters made into real different tasks - giving the game a voice of its own - rather than feeling like so much of Aarklash Legacy is just bits lifted from other games and mushed together.

Now I am going to pause my criticism. I feel like I may be coming across as overly negative about Aarklash and that's is not entirely fair. It has a lot going for it - diverse heroes and enemies, gorgeous environments, huge potential for great tactical game play and even a fairly intriguing story. I am going to say I enjoyed some of my time with this game. Until it became to much grind and I got bored. I didn't finish Aarklash Legacy. I looked at the hours I had put into it and what I got out of it and how much more I would have to push to reach the end and I just have better games in this style to play. I might go back to it - pick up where I left off and wrap it up - one day.

Overall Aarklash Legacy left me wanting both less and more out of it.