Review: Legends of Eisenwald

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Available platforms: Steam

Developer: Aterdux Entertainment

Aterdux Entertainment is an independent game development company located in Minsk, Belarus. Whether it is an accident or not but all of us are fans off good computer role-playing and strategy games

Legends of Eisenwald is an adventure game set in a medieval fantasy setting; You play as a Knight, a Baroness, or a Mystic, and gain experience and levels while interacting with NPCs, battling enemies, and completing quests. There is a lot to do in terms of variety, but most of the quests don’t engage the player on a more meaningful or deep level. Nearly every quest involves go to a specific place, fight something, return to quest giver, make a choice of some sort, which generally just changes what loot you’ll receive, and repeat.

His holiness needs more loot.

Combat is at the very core of Legends of Eisenwald, where it plays out like 4X strategy game, with a bit of a twist, the strategic element is stripped away from you since you are only allowed to attack the nearest target. This becomes increasingly frustrating when a character you are using is unable to damage the opponent or will die to the counter attack, but are left with no choice but to make the move. I thought at first that it may be a bug, but it appears to be implemented by design, to which point I ask a simple question; why make the combat look strategic when there is no strategy involved? At least with games like Fallen Enchantress and the like, you can control or influence where you will attack, in this, you may as well auto-resolve every battle since it makes no significant difference.

My experience with the game has been largely positive, where I’ve embarked on several quests with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished, but hindrances along the way have caused me to re-think on more than one occasion, for example, when I was advised by the witch to try 3 different methods to cure a lord of madness so that he’ll re-open the mines for the merchants proved troublesome when none of the methods suggested worked, and I ended up getting some beggar to scare him into re-opening the mines. Then again, I could have simply killed him, took control of the mines myself and re-opened it, so the choice was there I guess.

Forget strategy, just attack what the game lets you.

The main issue for me was the lack of interaction you can have with party members, and since you can field up to 12 characters, I felt that this would have enhanced the game somewhat. There is no dialogue or banter that occurs within the party itself and all the dialogue within the game consists of NPC’s talking to you. The other issue is that these characters are easily replaced since you can hire more people from villages or inns with no problem at all. Customization only really applies to what equipment a character is using, other than that, each of the character types looks identical, which plays on my mind after a while, and makes them even more disposable.

Honestly, this game is quite good, it isn’t without its flaws, and for the price is probably asking a bit much, but overall it’s a good addition to the Steam store. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes this game work as well as it does since it’s an overall positive experience, but it disappoints in so many ways, it makes the flaws seem that much more obvious. It’s a shame because there isn’t too much to say about this one, since it doesn’t excel too much in any given area. To sum it up, better than average, but lacks any real depth to make it great.

The environment looks nice, but the level of interaction is minimal.