Game Reviews

Eternal Legacy

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Eternal Legacy
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| Eternal Legacy

Some of the biggest satisfaction to be found in Eternal Legacy comes from pretending you’re Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher.

With every four steps in the game seemingly blocked by another group of monsters milling about waiting for you to attack, after a couple of hours of incessant battling you’ll start looking for ways to ‘wall-hug’ past the bad guys and press on with the story.

You see, while Gameloft’s latest ‘homage’ to a hit franchise (in this case, we’ll simply say the words ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Final’ then let you play a fun rearranging game) provides a generous piece of RPG action, it’s more a careless dollop than a meticulously carved slice.

The never-ending story

Eternal Legacy does its utmost to tick each and every Eastern role-playing box in the first 20 minutes.

You’ve got a spiky-haired hero with a silly name (Atrian), an overblown conspiracy plot involving men in hoods, and a girl needing to be rescued while wearing the shortest skirt ever seen outside of a Rhianna video.

If you make it through the dozen hours of the main story, the plot does suitably thicken with some twists, turns, and sacrificial deaths.

But with the meat of the gameplay falling into combat and walking (or riding on mounts) towards more combat, it’s the battle engine where most time is spent.

By default, you only control Atrian’s attacks, but you can switch to meticulously micro-managing all three of your party.

In practice, you'll probably focus on guiding Atrian through battles, assigning attacking, defensive, or healing roles to your comrades.

Cueing for victory

While movement around the open environments is handled with virtual analogue sticks, fighting is controlled entirely through menus.

It’s a breeze to assign a sequence of up to three actions at a time for Atrian.

You simply tap an action (basic attacks, magic skills, potion downing and passing around, or running away) and choose an enemy/comrade to apply them to.

It’s a pain, however, that actions can’t be cancelled once queued – especially when a party member suddenly needs a potion but Atrian already has three attacks lined-up.

In fairness, providing everyone stays topped up with Health Points and Mana (magic) - which you do by doling out potions or using a sidekick as a healer - the average scrap involves precious little effort.

Only the tougher bosses, who crop up every half hour or so, require more flair in mixing offensive and defensive buffs.

Grinding you down

A drip-feed of new powers, inventory items, and magical power-imbuing ‘fragments’ to enchant player weapons complete the RPG package, along with fetch-focused side quests and appallingly acted cut-scenes to skip (or mute).

While it all just about holds together as an inexpensive spin on the JRPG template, Eternal Legacy is essentially one long grind made more appealing by its striking visuals and mostly smart controls.

For the price of a London pint, Eternal Legacy offers stacks of gameplay, but for non-RPG addicts it could quickly become a grind too far.

Eternal Legacy

Although lengthy and often gorgeous to behold, Gameloft’s latest Android outing is held back by monotonous design and a serious lack of originality
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo