Every review I’ve read of Untold Legends grades it down for being derivative of every hack-n-slash RPG from Diablo on down. Well, I never played Champions of Norrath or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and I’m here to tell you that, played on its own, Untold Legends is a lot of fun, with hours and hours of bang for your monster-murderizing buck.
Graphically, Untold Legends is one of the best PSP games to date. The characters are unavoidably small, both in apparent size and number of pixels, but the game does a good job of working within these limitations and around them to create a pretty compelling visual experience. The variety of character models is a little low (okay, 4), but the game does have a nice enough selection of weapons and clothes to spice up your character’s appearance. You can see your character well enough on the paper doll model in the item screen to lead the more fashion-conscious to play some dress-up.
The environments look nice, although occasional artifacting makes it very apparent that they are composed of square tiles, and are generally bright enough to avoid too much trouble from the smearing problem that plagues all LCD screens. There are a good variety of different tile sets, and the randomly generated levels vary enough in room size and shape to give a different flavor to levels that do use the same tile set. The spells and other magical effects, too, range from the merely good to the truly impressive. Some of them, like the flaming yellow cyclone that follows the druid around, are mesmerizing.
The gameplay isn’t terribly innovative, but it’s solid. You can certainly mash your way through the game, but if you’re looking to take a more tactical and elegant approach, that works just as well and can be more visually gratifying. It’s basically ranged combat, melee combat, ranged and area magic. The control scheme is simple and works well.
The sound effects are good, though not spectacular, and the music is serviceable, though not great. I often find myself turning the music off, not because it’s bad, but because there isn’t enough of it to cover the many hours of gameplay.
The story unfolds through dialog boxes with little portrait icons, and, structurally, is as simple as “you need to beat up bad guys to get items in order to beat up other bad guys and save the world”. The flavor and color, however, are compelling enough to keep you moving forward, and one of the best features of this game is that there’s a lot to move through. This is quite possibly the longest game I’ve played on the PSP so far; I’d estimate the total length of a game at maybe 50 hours or so.
The multiplayer portion of the game is a hoot–you can play through your quest or your partner’s quest, and quest progress is only saved for the player whose quest it is, but the other player can still save to keep any items they aquired without overwriting their own quest.
This setup allows you to play along in single-player mode, then join up with your friend to kick some monster butt cooperatively while moving the quest along and getting better experience and loot than you would by yourself. Also, each class has some abilities that help out your buddies, if you have any near you. The characters always remain on the same level together, but can roam freely within it to clean out an entire dungeon quickly before teaming up to take out a boss.
The first time I played multiplayer, I ran across quite a few glitches–I would give my brother a pair of boots, only to have a headdress show up in his inventory, or teleporting out of a level, which should revive a dead comrade, instead kicks him out of the game. At another point I experienced hitching that seemed due to a loss of network connectivity, even though I was sitting less than five feet away from the other PSP. On the second and subsequent tries, however, I’ve had no trouble at all.
The single-player game, on the other hand, has more serious glitches, which I’m sure apply to multiplayer as well. I’ve seen the game freeze several times; usually this can be fixed by pressing the home button, and then X to go back to the game, but sometimes it seems to hard-lock the system, requiring a power-down.
More insidiously, there appears to be a glitch in the dungeon-generation system that can cause a door which shows up on the dungeon mini-map to not appear in the “real” dungeon. This can keep you from proceeding on your quest, and the only way to fix this appears to be to load a save from before you went into the dungeon and re-enter. This has happened to me only once, but I have seen it happen to various people on the official support forums. If you use two save slots and save to the second every hour or so, then this is likely to be nothing more than a minor annoyance; if not, however, then it’s the sort of thing that can rip the joy right out of your life, especially in a game this long.
All in all, I’d say that Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade is very good game with a few glaring faults, and would recommend it to anybody with a PSP that wants to get their dungeon crawl on.
