Land of Legends

Written by Dennis Wolfe on 12/2/2005 for PC  

Shrapnel Games seen potential in Tiny Hero Game Studios' fantasy strategy game Land of Legends, and I can see why. The turn based game is comfortable for almost any player, regardless of strategy game experience. Mature gamers as well as recruits to the strategy gaming world will likely find this game fun and addictive. The smooth, clean graphics that remind me that this is fantasy and fun, not serious and gloomy.

For most the game starts with a tutorial, which may seem beneath some gamers, but is helpful to show some of the basic strategies that may be overlooked by gamers that think they know everything about strategy games (you know who you are). If you feel that the tutorial is slow you have the ability to click through the chatter and still get the understanding of the concepts, or you can simply skip the tutorials altogether (they are optional). I found the tutorials to be thorough and complete. Once you spend around 20-30 minutes in the tutorials you are ready to go. The hard copy manual included with the game is also a very good resource for understanding the finer details of the game. You could definitely play the game just fine without opening the manual, however, for those that can force themselves to look over it, you will gain an advantage in understanding how the game works and how to use each of the over 70 unique abilities that are contained within the 8 very different races.

There is a single campaign with two levels of difficulty that consists of 32 missions (not counting the 3 tutorials). This gives you 4 missions as each race. The missions have various objectives that must be met and most of them have a set number of turns to complete that mission. You must complete 3 of the 4 missions for each race to unlock the first mission for the next race. Each race gets a bit more expensive to buy units and has more complex abilities for those units. I actually think there is a good, balanced curve to the increasing complexity as you progress the missions. The missions take anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour each, giving you the ability to play as short a game or as long a game as you have time for.

Most multiplayer games take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. There are two basic ways to play multiplayer, two player hot seat, or two player Internet. The hot seat mode will need to be used if more than one person is using one copy of the game to play together as Internet registration will not allow multiple accounts to use the same registration key (to prevent sharing keys on the Internet). The Internet matchmaking seems to work good, with a clean and simple chat enabled challenge/response system. They also track and rank registered players on the Tiny Hero Game Studios web site.

The 1.1 Patch is a must have not only for the 2 bug fixes but it also added several playability enhancements that really improved the overall experience. Some of the added features were the ability to save in progress (not just at completion of a mission), two new multi player and skirmish maps, ability to use all 8 races in multi player and skirmish games before completing campaigns, keyboard shortcuts, grid overlay, and improved animations. This review was based on the 1.1 version.

The game is simple, easy to learn, yet tough to master. It is easy enough to jump right in and play, yet complex enough to give variety and new experiences each time you play. The game also has low requirements allowing it to run on even the most basic machine. Whether you are new to the genre or a seasoned strategist, it is definitely worth downloading the 67MB demo and giving the game a try. Be warned, you may become addicted and feel drawn to complete the campaign. The game may not replace your favorite, but will give hours and hours of fun.