Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown Review
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Introduction
Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown is a party-based dungeon-crawling RPG in the vein of Might and Magic III-V. Developed by Silver Lemur Games, it was originally released back in 2019.
But now, with the game's sequel - The Song of Trees - slated for a 2023 release, we figured it was time for us to check it out and see what it had to offer and whether we should be looking forward to that sequel.
An Intro to Amberland
Before we begin, you might want to know that Silver Lemur Games is essentially a one-man studio - Legends of Amberland was designed and programmed by a single developer who then outsourced the game's audio and visuals.
Which makes the whole project quite darn impressive considering how closely it manages to follow in the footsteps of its venerable predecessors. And sure, certain aspects of Legends of Amberland may fall short when compared to those classic Might and Magic titles, but to counterbalance this, the game does offer some interesting fresh ideas and improvements to the formula.
On the most basic level, Legends of Amberland is a first-person dungeon crawler of the blobber variety - you control a party of seven adventurers on a grand quest in a vibrantly pixelated fantasy land.
The general premise of the game is that your kingdom is being besieged by ogres, but the king just doesn't seem to have enough knights to fend off this invasion. And in the meantime, the royal wizard discovers a nefarious spell of forgetfulness that's affecting the land and hires you to discover its origins.
You will then need to explore the kingdom and its immediate surroundings, jump through plenty of hoops to get access to an ancient library, put a stop to the machinations of evil wizards, and reunite the king with his magic crown that allows him to muster a large-enough force to repel the invasion.
Even for a dungeon crawler, the game's setting and story are very basic, but charming in their earnest simplicity. You have your wizards and their towers, dwarves that invariably mine a tad too deeply, marauding greenskins causing all sorts of troubles, and princesses with the worst luck when it comes to getting married.
Pint-sized Dungeons, Full-sized Dragons
In gameplay terms, the above is represented by an expansive world map you navigate one tile at a time. This map is infested with all sorts of monsters, but those tend to be mostly harmless compared to the dangers lurking in the many dungeons scattered across the land.
Apart from dungeons, you can stumble onto friendly towns (represented by a menu screen as opposed to Might and Magic's physical spaces), castles, and various dwellings housing quest-givers, attribute-boosting masters, and just assorted NPCs. And so, in order to eventually complete your grand quest, you'll be signing up for a heap of optional ones and then delving into various inhospitable places to earn some sweet levels and even sweeter loot.
Some of the game's side quests are really simplistic and exist mostly to point you to their adjacent dungeons, while others are more involved and send you all over the map in search of rare ingredients or hard-to-find items.
One of the best examples is a miner who wants a special dwarven pickaxe to dislodge a rare gem from a nearby mine. So, you go searching for the dwarves. But when you find them, turns out their anvil got stolen, and when you retrieve that, you're then tasked with finding a bunch of ore that's hidden all over the map so that they can forge you that pickaxe.
And seeing how after the first few areas, the game opens up and allows you to go pretty much wherever, with little to no hand holding, stuff like that adds a nice element of exploration into the mix.
What's also great is that the game doesn't seem to have any sort of level scaling, so you never know which areas are level-appropriate and where you should be going. You just go, see where you can find enemies you can defeat, flee from those you can't, and occasionally stumble onto some enclave of weaker foes you've managed to miss and go on a bit of a power trip.
And if you leverage the game's systems just right, you may find yourself punching way above your weight class. What do you do when you stumble upon a dungeon inhabited by a veritable horde of fire wizards that destroy your party without breaking a sweat? Well, if you've been stashing some fire resist gear away for an occasion just like this, you can run back to town, equip everyone with the right stuff, have your Wizard cast a spell that further amplifies those resistances, and then go back to the dungeon and laugh at the puny fireballs being thrown at you.
Speaking of going in and out of dungeons. If you know your Might and Magic, you're probably familiar with the old Town Portal-Lloyd's Beacon combo. Well, in Legends of Amberland you have Griffins instead. When outside of a dungeon, you can summon one from the map screen and get "teleported" to any tile you have previously visited. This is plenty convenient when you want to level up, deal with some nasty status effect, or sell some loot. However, when paired with how generous the game is with clearing its fog of war, this convenience can make the world feel smaller than it is.
Alternatively, you can rest while inside dungeons. You can go for a quick rest that restores your special ability charges plus some of your health, or a full rest that brings you back to full and restores your spellcasters' mana on top of it. Both of these are capped at three uses before you have to go back to town and restock your provisions.
And as for the dungeons themselves, unfortunately, here I think lies the game's biggest weakness. Sprawling elaborate dungeons are a pretty important part of the whole dungeon crawler experience, and Legends of Amberland, sadly, doesn't have those.
A great dungeon crawler dungeon should have puzzles and riddles scattered throughout. It should have challenging encounters waiting around every corner. Its dangers should include traps and navigational hazards. Ideally, it should have some theme or a trick to it, so that you have to complete some task to reach your goal. Secrets are also a must.
Well, Legends of Amberland has no puzzles or riddles, or tricks. It doesn't even have any secrets, as far as I can tell. In fact, I was mostly watching the minimap instead of the actual game screen during my playthrough, as there wasn't anything to miss, and it was much easier to navigate using the map.
Basically, all you do here is go inside a fairly straightforward dungeon, fight a bunch of monsters, loot some treasure chests, and on occasion flip a switch to open a nearby door. You don't even get any exploration or traversal spells of the kind you'd expect from a Might and Magic-inspired game. Hopefully, this gets improved in the sequel.
Now, most of the writing that contextualizes all of this ranges between serviceable and good. Occasionally though, it dips to the point where it's only barely above NPCs straight up telling you, "Adventurers, I want you to go to dungeon X and retrieve item Y for me."
Just in general, the game really could have used an editor, a second pair of eyes to go over the text, and maybe the systems too.
For example, the game has a fairly unique way of scaling damage - your characters have a baseline damage stat determined by their class and attributes, that's then modified by the weapon they wield. Starting weapons add about 100% to the base damage, while some rare artifacts can go all the way up to 190%.
In practice, this works fairly well, but it also makes all the different weapon types not matter at all. Axes deal more critical hits when wielded by dwarves, but apart from that, all the other weapons are identical. But then some of the weapons you find have added effects, like a chance to attack multiple enemies at once. To me, it seems obvious that all the different weapon types could've used a unique always-present modifier like that just to set them apart.
Gather Your Party in a Blob Before Venturing Forth
When it comes to creating your party, the game has a fairly robust system where you have six basic classes and four races, each with several subraces. And then, characters of a certain race have access to unique race-based variants of those basic classes that offer some special features, like Humans being able to become Champions instead of regular Knights and deal less damage in general, but be better at fighting evil spellcasters.
The game's combat is turn-based. Unlike in those classic Might and Magic games, here you can't start a fight by firing some arrows or spells at your foes. Instead, you have to walk into an enemy and that starts an encounter.
The game has an interesting approach to initiative, where your foes generally get two attacks per turn that happen at different times, while your heroes' turn order is determined by their position in the formation. Your three middle characters are considered your front line and will be getting attacked most often, while the outer four will usually only have to deal with AoE damage.
Despite being turn-based, the game's combat system is lightning-fast. Your front-liners are your main damage dealers here, with your spellcasters performing a more supporting role - healing and buffing your party. The game does have some offensive spells, but during the early game these tend to cost too much mana, and by the time you get to the late game, most enemies have resistances and immunities, severely limiting the effectiveness of your offensive magic.
Apart from spells and magic, your characters have special combat skills determined by their class. So, for example, your Knights will be able to attack all enemies in front of them, while your Bards will restore a bit of health and mana for your party. These range from borderline useless to somewhat weak, especially considering you can only use them once before resting.
In fact, the main challenge in Legends of Amberland comes not from individual encounters, but instead from your ability to manage your party's health and mana pools (provided you're someone who doesn't consider resting after every fight and then teleporting back to town to restock your provisions a fun and viable strategy), and equipping your heroes with the right gear for the job.
The game's itemization is one of its best aspects, mainly due to the way it handles encumbrance. A characters' class is the main thing that determines how much gear they can equip, with their race, attributes and certain items further increasing their carrying capacity. And it's all balanced in such a way that you usually can't equip enough gear to cover all your bases that include physical armor, elemental resistances, and status effect immunities. As a result, making sure you're prepared for the challenges ahead becomes a neat challenge.
Another interesting idea here is the way armor works. On the most basic level, it merely blocks a certain amount of damage from every attack directed at your characters. But, its value actually scales with your characters' levels, and so, the same piece of armor works better for a high-level character than it does for a novice.
And just in general, the game has plenty of these neat little ideas that make the whole thing quite fun even despite its overly simplistic approach to the actual dungeon crawling.
Technical Information
Now, I don't know if it's just me, but every screenshot of the game makes it look like it's being rendered at a wrong aspect ratio or something, with both monsters and terrain looking kind of squished, for lack of a better word.
To my great surprise, actually playing the game dispels this illusion and the whole thing looks quite neat and cheerful in an old-school pixelated kind of way.
The game's audio effects are a bit limited but get the job done, and the same can be said about its music - it sounds nice, but the game could've used a bit more of it.
The UI and controls can take a bit of getting used to, but they work just fine. By the looks of it, you can play the game by using either just your mouse or your keyboard, but as is usually the case with games like these, a combination of both works best.
The game uses a proprietary engine that I can't really fault in in any way. I've not encountered any crashes or bugs during my playthrough, and the game saves and loads lightning-fast without using too much resources.
Conclusion
While its dungeon design and certain oversimplifications preclude Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown from reaching the same heights as the games it's clearly inspired by, some of its unique and fresh ideas make it more than worthy of a playthrough.
And if the game's developer can build upon these ideas for the sequel, then that one may very well turn out great.
