I'll freely admit I've never played a tactical RPG before. Don't get me wrong, RPGs are my favorite genre of video game by far, but for whatever reason this particular subgenre has just passed me by over the years. I was a little surprised when Ironhide decided to branch out Kingdom Rush into this genre, but despite my lack of familiarity with it, I'm so invested in the franchise at this point that I knew I was going to play Legends of Kingdom Rush eventually, and with a little space between finishing my Vengeance Impossible Hero Challenge and Alliance coming out July 25, that time is now.
So what's my overall assessment? I really like the game, and I wish Ironhide had done more for it, like added another adventure or fixed some balance issues. As it is, it seems clear they are done for good with it. It does have some issues for sure, but since I don't have any other experiences to compare it to I don't know which ones are unique to the game vs. "that's just tactics RPGs for you".
My biggest complaint for sure about the game is that melee characters are absolutely worthless. Now of course that's putting too fine a point on it, but still, every time I recruit the fourth member of my party in an adventure and it's a melee character I groan inwardly, and if the adventure has a character selection node I have no hesitations about heading there and swapping them out for a ranged character instead.
A big part of why that is is the encounter designs, and here again I don't know how this compares to other, similar games, but in this game if you start the battle sending a melee character forward towards the enemy you're just guaranteeing their death. In every encounter you're always outnumbered - usually significantly - and your melee character will quickly be surrounded and take damage simultaneously from 2-3 melee enemies, plus probably also a couple of ranged ones, and no hero can stand up to that. Now I will admit I have not tried an all-melee party to see how that might affect things when the damage can be spread among multiple characters, but I'm not exactly hopeful that it's going to make the experience better.
It also doesn't help that practically every ranged enemy in the game does magic damage. I might be missing one, but I'm pretty sure that the Orc Archer is the only ranged enemy that does physical damage. (Yes, there are some other enemies like the Troll Champion that have special ranged attacks that do physical damage, but here I'm only considering enemies that have a ranged basic attack). This just exacerbates the problem - it doesn't matter how much armor the Dark Knight has if he's getting pelted with ranged magic attacks that bypass it.
This flaw in the game is only highlighted by the fact that the party you first play the game with consists of Gerald, the Ranger, and the Arcane Wizard. The Ranger and Arcane Wizard are arguably the two best non-hero characters in the game, and they only emphasize how pitiful Gerald is. You quickly learn that the best playstyle is to retreat away from the enemy, letting the ranged characters pick off enemy units as they come. Gerald's only role is to put Shield of Retribution on himself and soak up hits from the enemy if they manage to get to your party before you can kill them all with ranged attacks.
Another problem with melee characters is their lack of mobility. This still wouldn't solve the problem above, but it would be nice if they were at least able to maneuver strategically. It would be great if melee characters could charge forward and take care of ranged characters in the back like Flareons or Enchantresses, but with a pitiful two movement points most of the time heroes like Gerald and Bravebark are stuck doing nothing but dumbly engaging the enemy's front line. There's a reason that in most RPGs (especially ARPGs) melee characters get movement skills. Reg'son is the only melee character that breaks this trend, and he's by far the best one as a result.
There are some other things in the game I have issue with:
- It feels weird that characters can't "ready" actions, like "attack when an enemy comes in range". If your character can't get in range of an enemy to make an attack in a turn, then they basically end up wasting a turn. And with enemy melee characters you can pretty much always plan movement so that they have to stop one hex away from your characters, guaranteeing your own melee characters can get first strike. It's a big part of the strategy of the game, but sometimes it feels oddly cheap.
- It stinks that characters also can't delay until later in the turn order. When your Sorceress gets stuck going last it greatly diminishes the utility of her curse ability, and in general it makes it much harder to set up combos to trigger the epic ability on skills.
- I wish you could explore the adventure map for more XP before heading to the final boss. Only in the last two adventures do you even have a chance to get your entire party to three stars before the end (and even then Wild Moon can be iffy). I understand the "choose your path (and its consequences)" mechanic the developers were going for - do you choose the path that has fewer nodes (and thus XP) but has the weaponsmith for damage upgrades, or do you choose the path with more nodes (and XP), but also has more dice encounters that might go against you? - but I would rather have the freedom to explore instead.
- The game is a reasonable challenge on Normal mode, but man does it need a Veteran mode for replayability.
- I love the Arena - both the daily challenges as well as the quick battle - but I really wish there was a custom encounter builder so I didn't have to keep clicking the dice on the quick battle to get a scenario I'm interested in.
There are some other mechanics that I didn't necessarily dislike myself, but I can see them being big turnoffs for some players, steering them away from the game:
- I have mixed feelings about dice encounters. In general I prefer skill-based mechanics over pure RNG. If something bad happens to me in a game, I want it to be because I failed in some way, with the knowledge that if I played better I could have avoided it. Still, the dice encounters do generally heighten the tension of the game in a good way - what if an encounter goes bad and a character gets exhausted going into the next battle?
- The enemy AI is very predictable - enemies generally always attack or move towards the closest character to them, and they'll always use their special abilities if they're off cooldown. The strategy of the game then is largely about planning - if I do X, the enemy will then do Y, so I can then do Z and force them to do Q, etc. I enjoy it personally, and I don't know how common a theme that is in tactics games, but I can see other people not caring for it.
I know that sounds like a lot of criticism, which probably makes you think I didn't like the game, but I save my criticism for games I love - bad games aren't worth my time to explain why they are bad or how they could be better. The shortcomings of a game like this break my heart because I see how much more it could be.
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| Insert obligatory Star Wars meme |
So again, I have no idea where Legends ranks in the pantheon of tactics RPGs, but I really enjoyed it and heartily recommend it. With all that said, here is the walkthrough:
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