Dungeon of Legends

Dungeon of Legends has an intriguing central idea. Unlike most dungeon-crawlers, it sends you out into the world unarmed. There's no hacking or slashing here - just plenty of dodging and jumping.

Unfortunately, the controls aren't up to the tasks the game sets you. It's meant to be tough, but when it's the D-pad that's to blame for a failure rather than a mistake on your part then it's time to hang up your dungeoneering cloak and find something else to do.

You play a mage of some description. You're carrying a glowing blue stick, but it's only for show. The skeletons and ghosts that inhabit the caverns and underground rooms of Dungeon of Legends aren't for beating to a pulp.

In fact, if you get too close to them you're going to drop dead. It's up to you to weave around the robotic, insensible, pathetically primitive patrolling guards, dodge the swinging spiked balls, and leap over the bottomless pits. A D-pad in the bottom-left moves you around and a button in the bottom-right makes you jump.

Each room you encounter is a puzzle of one kind or another, though not a very interesting or complicated one. Some might require you to pull switches in the right order, while others are as simple as getting through a maze of sharp things without getting any of them stuck in your face.

There are keys to collect and secrets to discover, but it's unlikely that you're going to have the patience to find them all. As polished as the presentation of the game is, the controls are just as frustrating. You'll stumble into spike pits, totter off ledges, and see your jumps falling disastrously short.

It's a problem confounded by floaty collision detection. It often feels like your character isn't quite connected to the world she's exploring, leaving you impaled when you thought there was space to spare.

It's a shame, because there's a clever game somewhere under all of that. It's nice to wander through a dungeon-crawler without mashing the 'kill' button every second, but Dungeon of Legends lacks the innovation or the execution to make you hang around for long.