Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown Review - Page 2
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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.
