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Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom |
| Platform: PS3 • Developer: Sony Online Entertainment • Genre: Action/RPG • ESRB Rating: T • Words: S-Hiryu |
| I don’t know about you, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve had this nagging feeling that the action RPG/dungeon crawling genre has been missing an integral game mechanic all these years. If you could add any one gameplay aspect, from any other game out there to the RPG genre, you’d pick instant-death bottomless pits, right? If you knew the developers were also integrating spaced-out, manual save points, well then bottomless pits should be a no-brainer. It adds such a layer of depth and challenge when you find an awesome piece of armor, and make it halfway to that next save point when you happen to miss a jump and instantly die, reverting to your awesome armor-less previous save. The replay value, oh man, it just shoots through the roof. |
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| Character build options are too confusing in contemporary RPGs, there are too many choices. Why doesn’t someone come along and make a dungeon crawler where you not only hit the level cap before you finish the game, but also make it so it’s possible to learn and max out every skill in your skill set in the process? You know, so you don’t have to make any decisions about what skills to invest your points in. Wait, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom has all this? Sign me up, that rerolling a character to try out a new skill set is for the birds. While we’re at it, can you make it so there’s no new game plus option, or any way to import a developed character into any new game at all, but give me four selectable difficulties anyway? How about giving me online play, but forcing everyone to make a new character from scratch if they want to join a game, even if said game is midway through the final act? You can? Awesome. |
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| It’s hard trying to keep the attention of gamers today, so removing that pesky character import/export feature should go hand in hand with a nice and tight eight hour long campaign, naturally. And just when you thought SOE couldn’t streamline those bothersome, lengthy RPG formulas even further, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom also removes those oh so annoying towns and even those inconvenient, interactive NPCs. They just get in the way, trying to get you to save their son or reward you with loot. Remember those well-designed, practical save points mentioned earlier? Those are good enough vendor replacements for Dark Kingdom. While you only have one weapon throughout the entire game (you just switch out socketable runes and gems to give it different stats and skins), and it’s true you only find three armor models per class throughout the entire adventure--remember, you don’t want any of those irritating RPG conventions slowing you down. No lengthy quests, character development, or choices of any kind. No, here, it’s just approximately eight hours of hack and slash brilliance without any of those convoluted RPG elements to get in your way. |
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Okay let’s run through the list: Eight hour campaign? Check. Inability to carry existing characters into any new game type? Check. Extra modes such as online play and additional difficulties that are completely unplayable due to the lack of character importing (you know, to mock the player)? Check. Instant-death bottomless pits…In an RPG? Oh God yes, check. No towns or interactive NPCs? Check. Maxing out your level and entire skill list before the game even ends? Check. Elimination of any type of character development or build options? Check. |
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| …You want me to keep going? Just stop reading this review right now and go out and buy this game, you’ll thank me later. Whatever you do, don’t go out and buy those dated, imitators that gave you all those pesky, time consuming RPG “standards” instead. You know the kind; the lengthy Diablo II, or that ugly 2D game Sacred, or Dungeon Siege, or PSO, or Titan Quest, or Baulder’s Gate. Those game suck. They don’t even have bottomless pits. |
Rating |
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6.0 |
 + It looks better than a PS2 game, and that’s good enough for a next-gen launch title, right? |
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8.0 |
 + The soundtrack is great and the voice acting is actually decent. No, seriously. |
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4.0 |
 ++ Sony must have saved so much money on skipping the play testing stage of development. This new trend keeps production costs low and new games hitting the shelf on a constant basis and as soon as possible. Genius. |
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7.0 |
 + Relatively well designed characters and environments. The 2D art in the cutscenes is actually pretty good...Yeah, I got nothing here. |
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2.0 |
 -- Campaign less than eight hours long. -- A meager three, stereotypical, marginally different character classes. -- Inability to carry characters over to one of the four selectable difficulties. -- Inability to carry characters over to other players’ online games. -- No character build options between classes; every character is the same because every character maxes out their measly nine skills by the end of the game. -- Did I mention this is a next generation dungeon crawler? |
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4.5 |
 -- This is an open letter to Sony Online Entertainment: please, please, stop raping the dungeon crawler genre. |
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