Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom
SOE's hack and slash arrives Boxguy-free. Unfortunately, that's not the only thing missing...
Published: November 28, 2006
Part of it might be that all the RPG elements were mostly carried over from the simple ideas introduced in the PSP versions of Untold Legends. In other words, you hack stuff up, gain experience and then devote those points toward leveling up health or defense (in melee and magic) and attack (again, in physical or magic) or strengthening spells. The whole thing is modeled after the dungeon crawls that Snowblind did so well during their Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath (which, incidentally, was published by SOE), but it lacks the wow factor or interesting characters (or, uh, huge breasts) of those games.
That's not to say the game doesn't at least look nice. No part of Dark Kingdom is outright bad, it's just sort of there, doing its job well enough to get by. Visually, this translates to a modest draw distance, a fair number of enemies on screen, some interesting and smooth animations... and a world that's as generic and tired as one can get.
Same goes for the audio. Voice actors that just sort of limp through their lines, music that sounds regal or quasi spooky (complete with changing choir) to adventurous without ever staying memorable. Enemy snarls, weapon clashes hero grunts and yells, it's all there. But it all it just sorta... there. Even the Dolby Digital effects feel like they were just shoved to the back channels to do something with those speakers. If it were relative to the position of the player or the camera, that would be one thing, but the effects are just thrown back there without any real reason why.
So it all boils down to how long you can stand to button mash and devote points to basic character growth, and little else. The storyline never really picks up, your chosen character never becomes interesting, and the gameplay never evolves past the original premise. Again, it must be pointed out that this is not a bad game, it's just not good either, and mediocrity is perhaps an even more dangerous thing than an outright terrible game. It teases you, baits you into thinking it might get better because, hey, it's not horrible, right?
Don't take the bait. Dark Kingdom isn't worth money, but it's not bad enough to hate on either. Just leave it be and maybe the series will return to the PSP where the simplicity can be sort of explained away by being a portable game. This isn't, and it most certainly can't.
