Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Eternal Legacy Review






I'm new to the whole iOS gaming community. I thought mobile devices were platform for nothing more than casual time wasters. Angry Birds, Peggle, Crush The Castle, etc. Those are the only games I've ever really seen people playing on their phones. I even own an iPod, and the few games I played were either simple puzzle games or skimmed down versions of other games. Little did I know, there were hundreds of legitimate titles to play. Eternal Legacy is a turn based RPG. This is my first "actual" iOS game I've played, and I was kinda blown away.

Graphics: 8.5/10
I'm not entirely sure what all the iPod/iPhone is capable of graphically, so I have nothing to compare this title to. The graphics aren't bad, they're a bit jagged and the textures leave much to be desired.

  This could pass for a PS2 game.

But other than those two minor issues, everything else is beautiful. The environments are huge and colorful, full of rich detail. Each environment is pretty unique, with a huge amount of visual variety between stages.

Story: 4/10
You play as Astrian, a rebel trying to damage the governmental tyranny that controls the lands. He's also searching for his lost father. 

Standard.

Gameplay: 7/10
So it's a turn based RPG. Everyone goes into one of these games knowing EXACTLY what to expect. And this game doesn't disappoint on that front. You run around, explore, interact, and fight random battles. Attack, Skill, Item, Flee. Everything you'd expect. The fighting does tend to get very bland.   While you're running around in the open world, other enemies are also floating around. If you run into them, guess what happens? You battle do the death. Normally, you can only control one character, but that got extremely boring for me, so I quickly turned on "Control All". A healer character controlled by the CPU worked too well. I just had to Attack and sit back. I didn't have to worry about dying at all. Things changed once I was able to to control my entire party. You fight, you level up, you gain stats, you learn skills. Basic RPG fare. Also, you collect these things called "fragments". These unlock new spells and allow you to summon creatures to fight for you. You can pretty much snooze your way through fights, this drags the overall solid gameplay down.

Music: 3/10
Repetitive. I eventually stopped playing with sound on altogether.
Also the voice acting blows.

Overall: 5/10
The game is really pretty, sounds horrible, and plays well enough. You wouldn't be missing anything if you didn't play it.