Review: Black Legend

Author: Shea Layton

In recent memory, many tactics and strategy games have not taken themselves too seriously, pairing heavier story elements with cute artwork or a whimsical narrative with beautifully curated characters. Warcave’s second game, Black Legend, is a moody game that goes against that recent trend, thrusting the player into a dark story matched with an unnerving art direction hoping to create a feeling of tension. The strategy and dark mood, while initially engrossing, feels paper-thin as little development occurs throughout the game.

Black Legend (Steam, Switch[reviewed] Xbox One, PS4)
Developer: Warcave Studio
Publisher: Warcave Studio
Release: March 25, 2021
MSRP: $29.99

Pirates and cultists at war in an ill-fated city overrun by the cult leader Mephisto, Black Legend immediately immerses the player into a lore-driven world. The plot is simple: rescue the townspeople who haven’t been murdered by the cult while also doing some murdering of your own. But what Black Legend does best is build a world around the city. As you speak to each character hiding behind their torch-lit door, they give you more information about the cult, about the city before it was overrun, about the fog that turns normal people into deformed creatures, and about their own lives. The information you are given from the various townspeople whose faces that you never see is the motivating factor for progressing in the story.

The game starts you out by making your own character. The character creation was incredibly limited, choosing from a set number of faces, body types, and hair. To those who like some character customization level, odds are you will be left scratching your head as to why it was included in the game.

Battles are conducted in the city streets as you are spotted by enemies, signaled by highlighted red areas on the cobbled streets. Your main character and three others are pitted against different enemies, such as multiple-classed cultists and their ravenous dogs. Each character’s turn is placed on a grid at the top of the screen, giving you the opportunity to bring forth your plans for victory. If one character does not use all of their action points, their turn will come around quicker than using all of the action points. It’s an interesting mechanic, but I never felt compelled to employ that much strategy. Your characters can do more damage and increase their chance for critical hits by flanking your enemies from the side or from behind.

One of the keys to combat is a system called Humorism, where your characters deal status effects to the enemies, and when compounded upon, enable your characters to deal colossal damage. The system is not essential to win battles, but it adds some enticing strategy to see how much you can decimate the masses of cultists who aren’t fortunate enough to avoid your path.

The strategy never feels too complicated, inviting beginners to strategy and tactics games without feeling overwhelmed. The trade-off is that the strategy never builds upon itself to offer more for longtime fans of the genre. About midway through the game, I felt as if I was defeating every enemy the game threw at me too easily, so much so that I grew bored with the battles. I went out of my way at all costs to have to engage more enemies just so I could see how the story would develop. Some of the battles also take place in narrow passageways. As you attempt to place your character, it can become troublesome trying to finagle with the camera to place them in the exact spot.

Some of the bosses are cleverly designed, looking menacing and monstrous. The unique equipment that they drop is also something to look forward to. However, there is a definite balance issue with them. The first boss I encountered felt way too powerful for my characters, so I was left using an attack method that took 45 minutes to effectively thwart the big baddie. Other bosses, especially towards the end of the game, felt easier than some of the random battles that I got into on the street.

Partway through the game, you are introduced to the class system for your characters, which you can equip to them at any time when not in battle. By mixing and combining classes, this unlocks new abilities for your characters, as detailed by a lengthy and overwhelming tutorial. I never got a full grasp of the system, as some characters I equipped with classes became powerhouses while others were left weak with no abilities.  The game didn’t provide any further explanation of the class system, so I just left the class system alone.

The mood of the game is dark and discomforting, as the environment is plagued by fog and an overcast sky. The sparse music only plays to heighten the insecurity you will feel as you move along the streets or to intensify the battles you find yourself in. The only living souls you see in the streets are the cultists looking to kill and hang you, similarly to the waves of hanging bodies you see littered across the city districts. Being told all of the atrocities that the cultists have committed across the city, the mood only amplifies the heinousness of the results that you see.

As you walk through the streets of the various districts completing missions and saving people, your only source of navigation are the signposts pointing you in the general direction of where you may want to go next. Because of this, the game felt old-school in its exploration of the environment. I felt like a map system may have benefitted the game towards the back end of the game, as some of the areas you go into can be winding, causing you to spend a lot of time looking for one place of interest.

Thankfully, towards the end of the game, it gifts you with the ability to fast travel using the underground passageways via wells that can be found at various districts. This eliminates a lot of the backtracking that you do earlier in the game. Had the game introduced this system from the beginning, it would have been a much shorter game.

One aspect of the game that I hope Warcave Studio goes back to fix is the item system. There is a marketplace where you can buy useful items and weapons for your characters. The problem is when you go to purchase items; you are only given the cost. There is no explanation offered about the effects of the items or the stats of the weapons. You are essentially blindly buying some items in hopes that you need them. At the start of the game, where each resource is valuable, it is a major hindrance as you are planning which items should go on which characters. I’m hoping that a patch is planned in the future to correct this problem.

One other problem that I must mention is frame rate stuttering within parts of the game. At one particular part in the game (the Graveyard District), the frame rate was so poor that my character would stop, and then suddenly, I was in the midst of a battle with no prior indication that there were enemies ahead of me. Playing on my Switch, I had some dips in quality in terms of pop-in and graphics, which weren’t detracting. The same cannot entirely be said of the frame rate on the Switch version.

Verdict: Black Legend is slated as a fun, budget strategy RPG. There are a lot of strategy games out on the market, but none have the spooky feeling that it has. If you want to get lost in 17th Century lore with some entry-level strategy, there is fun to be had in the game. With the imbalance and multiple small issues, you can wait until it drops in price.

Wait for a sale

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher]