Review – Aarklash: Legacy

Published in 2013 by Nacon and developed by Cyanide Studio, this game attempts to be a tactical adventure game based on the management of a band of heroes. Unfortunately, it fails in nearly every regard in trying to not be boring. Normally I am a huge fan of isometric party-based RPGs, but this one fails at nearly every hurdle.

This game is boring. That is basically it. After a while of playing the game just gets dull and monotonous, and it becomes more annoying than fun. There are no armors, weapons, or other equipment sets for your characters that you could possibly have fun with finding or grinding for, like in Diablo 2, or games like it, like Inquisitor Martyr. Almost none of those things exist, and what you do get barely has an effect at all. There are only earrings, artifacts, and rings, which just improve stats, and which they used so that they wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of making the character models change at all.

So with this, the poor story line and character development, (and some really meh voice acting) you don’t really get attached to the characters, which are what the whole game revolves around.

However, the character designs are interesting, and the graphics are pretty decent for a game that came out in 2013. The music is also alright, nothing that would catch your attention, but also nothing that becomes annoying and repetitive, taking away from the game experience.

There are some other things that don’t change: character abilities. Do you like having four of the same abilities for each character for the entire game? I don’t. On level up you can spend a point to make the ability cost less mana, or do more damage, or heal more, but at the end of the day they are the same. They never change, and thus became extremely stale. Yawn.

Also, some of the mechanics are just, well, kinda stupid. You have a tank character that has to spend health to use abilities. Your healer cannot regenerate mana and so has to steal it from your two other allies, a rogue and a mage, and they can get busted up really badly. So all you are doing is just constantly healing your tank, juggling the health of your two other characters, and trying to keep the healer with enough mana. At first this kind of sounds interesting, it seems like an interesting way to keep the combat active and fun, but after a while (and a LOT of fighting) it just gets really, really annoying to constantly do over and over and over.

It does have a good strategy game at it’s core, its just too bland and boring for me, and annoying.