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IGN Review of Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code
When the first Untold Legends hit the PlayStation Portable, its grand-scale adventure was many times more expansive than what most portable game owners were used to. Its realtime RPG combination of fast-paced action and complex character customizing also fit well in the handheld, bringing new life to a genre that was fast wearing out its welcome on consoles. No wonder that, even though it felt rushed to meet the PSP launch, the game went on to be one of the top sellers of the new system. Untold Legends quickly established itself as a key franchise for Sony Online Entertainment, with the new
PS3 Dark Kingdom and the long-awaited and significantly enhanced PSP sequel.
For Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code, SOE is in many ways delivering the game we all wanted Brotherhood of the Blade to be. It's got online multiplayer, it's got more modern storytelling and production values, and it has more fleshed-out gameplay design. But as far as Untold Legends has come in this sequel, so has the PSP's game library. So many of the additions are outclassed by other games it is competing with that, as a whole, Warrior's Code still feels incomplete and rushed. For dungeon crawler fans, it holds the allure of a portable epic as you slog through marshes and battle online rivals. Most others, however, will really have to consider whether they wait for Untold Legends to get it right on console or the next PSP adventure.
While Brotherhood of the Blade made by with the bare minimum in storytelling and presentation elements (still picts and text for 30 hours of dialog ... good times), this second Untold Legends steps things up significantly. There are FMV sequences at major chapter marks, voices for all of the major characters you meet and even in-game cinematics at various points of the story. It's still a ways off from PS2-quality in how often and how well-directed the cutscenes tend to be, but it's a big step up. Usually, that is. Using the in-game characters from a hack-and-slash doesn't always work to its advantage, with fighters that look great at a distance suddenly seeming small and cartoonish in dialog scenes. And the scripting for these scenes is still all over the map in terms of budget. The opening of the game has an FMV intro before dumping you in the middle of a sewer with nothing but text dialog to set up the rest of the story; similarly, one scene shows off sharp animation of two toothy ogres arguing, while the very next sequence has an auto-cam that shows nothing but a wooden door as you try to talk with a locked-up prisoner.
For The Warrior's Code, effort went into driving the gameplay in new and more complex ways. Being that the realtime RPG is usually knocked for being a button-mashing fest, anything to get us off the attack button is a plus. Some of those efforts pay off big, others go nowhere, and unfortunately, one big one promises to be cool but, because of wonky design, is nearly broken in actual use.
The heartbreaker is the Attack of Opportunity maneuver, a new addition where, if an enemy stalls or is stunned, you have the chance at a significantly powerful attack. In theory, it's brilliant -- there are three different Attacks of Opportunity, depending on how fast you are with triggering the attack and what kind of trick you want to pull. Choose wisely and move fast, because if you hold the button for too long, you may miss your Opportunity window. Attack of Opportunity gives tuned-in players choices in combat, and it changes how you approach certain enemies -- a giant mallet-swinging ogre, for instance, will likely get his weapon stuck in the ground if you engage him at a near distance, while a spinning Mine Sower moves too fast for most attacks but will always have to stop (if you give it just enough room to feel safe from your blade) to lay its mines.
Neat idea, in theory. So what's the problem? The context-sensitivity of Attack of Opportunity is so unresponsive that it's almost never worth using. You almost have to be right on top of the enemy to start charging the Attack of Opportunity, and if you begin hold down the button too far away (you usually have to use the whole stun time to get a Loot Quake, so it's an easy mistake to make), it won't start charging when you do get into the sensing range. It's also buggy, so sometimes the charge doesn't start when you're within a proper distance, again losing time on your charging. Often, it's easier to just tap the button for the powerful single-strike, or else use the stunned moment to wail away regular attacks. It's a feature that's supposed to add player reflexes to a genre that otherwise feels mindless at times, but if you have to make assumptions for when and where the computer will recognize your attack, it doesn't work.
You get the feeling that the other big addition, the Changeling form where you turn into a beast, was similarly never thought out fully. So, I can turn into a cat or a beastman or a ... I know the manual calls it a Fury, but I can't help looking at the droopy ears on this one critter and not think "Muppet". That's neat the first few times, until you realize that there's no advantage to beast form besides slightly stronger attacks. By the time you've bought blades doing 80 hits per turn (and often with a much wider attack range or a faster hit rate), your beast form becomes woefully outclassed and unnecessary. You also don't have access to any of your powered-up magic once in beast form, with only your standard attack and one magic charging technique. You don't get to see anything special in the stage when you're in your Changeling form, you get no set of custom moves to experiment with, and you don't get any health or power boost by becoming a Muppet. Why bother?
Faring better are some of the other adjustments and additions to basic gameplay. The charging attack gives you a little more to think about with while slugging away, and the ability to use as many as six attacks (two buttons plus all four D-Pad directions) lets you use the varied abilities easier in combat than the dial-an-attack system from part 1. The variety of magic and abilities is strong again (one of the strengths of the original), with moves that can be used for freezing or poisoning or knocking back enemies, for charging your own blades, for performing crazy acrobatics, or any number of other techniques. The interface for managing your character has also been massively streamlined, making for easier item comparison and switching. The weapon and armor balance, on the other hand, is barely improved and in some ways not as good as the original. There's less variety in the weapons each character can hold (whereas before, you more often had choices of whether to go with quicker attacks or powerful strokes), and the weapon balance and experience leveling system is all out of whack -- depending on which character class you play as, you'll likely have a grossly overpowered warrior by the halfway mark. There are now five character classes instead of four, but there's still not a lot of variety or choice there. (By the by, why can't I choose male or female versions of any character? If I want to be an ass-kicking chick, I shouldn't be stuck with only two choices.) And though the gem system is still there for customizing armor and weapons, there are still are few really special items to find.
One place that The Warrior's Code slaughters its original is in mission design. The first game was purely fetch quests and boss battles, and while the second game doesn't add a lot more variety over the long haul, it at least feels more weighty because things are happening, and they're affecting the story. There are now escort and entourage missions where you'll be fighting side-by-side with other warriors. Some missions will have you seeking out characters to talk to, or tracking down levers to switch and embattlements to destroy. There are even a few puzzle elements now, such as when you must use a boss's attacks against him to trigger elemental containment pillars. Mini-bosses are still just giant-sized versions of regular soldiers, but the game's various boss battles are often unique and challenging encounters. Just the addition of event sequences makes all the difference -- it may not be "gameplay" when you are stopped from going down a path by a sudden avalanche, but at least it feels like something's happening in the world. And thanks to tremendous improvements in disc loading and significantly bigger levels (all tied together with a fast-travel map), it's much more fun exploring than it was last time.
One more key addition is online play. There was a gaping hole left in the first PSP game with just ad-hoc support, and Sony Online Entertainment is finally bringing the online experience it's known for (and named for) to PSP with the sequel. The choice of game types is impressive here, offering everything from typical slugfests and beast-killing bouts to greedy gold-collecting challenges to team events pairing you up for battle or races -- there's even a game of Capture the Flag. And, of course, there's the online (or offline wireless, if you have a friend nearby, for this or any other mode) play-through of the main quest. As is typical with realtime RPGs, multiplayer is fun but is also wildly unbalanced depending on who joins a game -- a few modes allow weaker players to struggle through, but most often, newbies will have no chance. Luckily, the online interface allows you to easily see what class levels you're going up against before you join a game, and you can arrange Friends' Lists or boot players to arrange the match-up you want. As a general time-waster, you could spend a lot of time playing The Warrior's Code online. However, the player cap of just four online is limiting, and as soon as you have four super-powered characters in a stage all using their magic at once against dozens of enemies, the game's engine starts to chug. And one big strike against it is the lack of in-game chat. The toggle-command responses you can send the other player aren't customizable or complex enough to carry on a conversation beyond yes, no, or taunt (and most players ignore commands anyway), and the lack of support for the PSP's new microphone headset means you will often be trudging through gigantic levels with now two players having no clue where to go instead of one.
As much an improvement the new multiplayer features make to Untold Legends 2, the single-player sticks out because of how little improved (and, in my opinion, devolved) the storytelling is from the original. Brotherhood of the Blade was simple in its story and dry in its telling, but at least it had a few plot twists and turns to keep things interesting. The Warrior's Code is almost a straightforward telling of good versus evil, with a heralded prince at the center that you must pave the way for. You are said to be the linchpin in the resistance's effort since you are of the rare breed of Changeling, but it matters little without conflict for the character in who to align with given that you possess this much power. And since the Changeling form makes so little difference in gameplay, you often forget that you have this power to begin with. Last time, there were sub-quests that you could take up, and you could choose your missions as you collected them; here, it's a linear plod through each story point -- you can't even talk to most townsfolk for your own fun. If you were bored by the tale told with the last Untold Legends, the addition of FMV and cinematics won't make this one more compelling.
Visually, The Warrior's Code is a big step up in use of special effects over the first Untold Legends, but it's competing against a heck of a lot on the system these days. Environments are still somewhat boxy and non-descript, and the game doesn't have the random-generating level feature to fall back on as before. There are more pieces of geometry added now to make the world feel more lifelike -- lots of crumbled castles and bubbling pits of lava and glistening crystals of ice stalagmites and steaming vent pipes -- but there still aren't very many clear landmarks or designed stage features to make orienting yourself on the map easy. If you're on a desert stage, you'll see the same sprawl of desert and rock throughout; if you are setting out to see a castle, you won't actually see the outside or any details of the castle until you load the stage from the generic gateway leading up to it. There are also a number of times when foreground things get in the way of the camera. The similar X-Men Legends 2 on PSP has the upper hand over Untold Legends 2 in a number of ways, but then again, that game took eons to load even the character menu, while Untold Legends 2 zips along with fast menus and speedy levels. And even if we're left wanting a little more, The Warrior's Code still makes for a sharp PSP game with its massive spell effects and detailed backgrounds. There are certainly some memorable moments to view -- I loved the catapult made out of an ogre with the yoke tied to his arms stretched in a Christ pose, and I loved the spinning sculpture in the game's early temple (it reminded me of Ogra from The Dark Crystal). The slowdown from part 1 has been dealt with handily, as you'll only see the game chug in multiplayer or some very intense critter encounters. Also, the ghosting from the simplistic textures used last time is cleaned up considerably. It's not by any means an ugly game on PSP, but it doesn't feel special anymore this second time out on a handheld, and the general design of characters and environments is still usually too uninventive and bland.
©2006-03-31, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
PS3 Dark Kingdom and the long-awaited and significantly enhanced PSP sequel.
For Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code, SOE is in many ways delivering the game we all wanted Brotherhood of the Blade to be. It's got online multiplayer, it's got more modern storytelling and production values, and it has more fleshed-out gameplay design. But as far as Untold Legends has come in this sequel, so has the PSP's game library. So many of the additions are outclassed by other games it is competing with that, as a whole, Warrior's Code still feels incomplete and rushed. For dungeon crawler fans, it holds the allure of a portable epic as you slog through marshes and battle online rivals. Most others, however, will really have to consider whether they wait for Untold Legends to get it right on console or the next PSP adventure.
While Brotherhood of the Blade made by with the bare minimum in storytelling and presentation elements (still picts and text for 30 hours of dialog ... good times), this second Untold Legends steps things up significantly. There are FMV sequences at major chapter marks, voices for all of the major characters you meet and even in-game cinematics at various points of the story. It's still a ways off from PS2-quality in how often and how well-directed the cutscenes tend to be, but it's a big step up. Usually, that is. Using the in-game characters from a hack-and-slash doesn't always work to its advantage, with fighters that look great at a distance suddenly seeming small and cartoonish in dialog scenes. And the scripting for these scenes is still all over the map in terms of budget. The opening of the game has an FMV intro before dumping you in the middle of a sewer with nothing but text dialog to set up the rest of the story; similarly, one scene shows off sharp animation of two toothy ogres arguing, while the very next sequence has an auto-cam that shows nothing but a wooden door as you try to talk with a locked-up prisoner.
For The Warrior's Code, effort went into driving the gameplay in new and more complex ways. Being that the realtime RPG is usually knocked for being a button-mashing fest, anything to get us off the attack button is a plus. Some of those efforts pay off big, others go nowhere, and unfortunately, one big one promises to be cool but, because of wonky design, is nearly broken in actual use.
The heartbreaker is the Attack of Opportunity maneuver, a new addition where, if an enemy stalls or is stunned, you have the chance at a significantly powerful attack. In theory, it's brilliant -- there are three different Attacks of Opportunity, depending on how fast you are with triggering the attack and what kind of trick you want to pull. Choose wisely and move fast, because if you hold the button for too long, you may miss your Opportunity window. Attack of Opportunity gives tuned-in players choices in combat, and it changes how you approach certain enemies -- a giant mallet-swinging ogre, for instance, will likely get his weapon stuck in the ground if you engage him at a near distance, while a spinning Mine Sower moves too fast for most attacks but will always have to stop (if you give it just enough room to feel safe from your blade) to lay its mines.
Neat idea, in theory. So what's the problem? The context-sensitivity of Attack of Opportunity is so unresponsive that it's almost never worth using. You almost have to be right on top of the enemy to start charging the Attack of Opportunity, and if you begin hold down the button too far away (you usually have to use the whole stun time to get a Loot Quake, so it's an easy mistake to make), it won't start charging when you do get into the sensing range. It's also buggy, so sometimes the charge doesn't start when you're within a proper distance, again losing time on your charging. Often, it's easier to just tap the button for the powerful single-strike, or else use the stunned moment to wail away regular attacks. It's a feature that's supposed to add player reflexes to a genre that otherwise feels mindless at times, but if you have to make assumptions for when and where the computer will recognize your attack, it doesn't work.
You get the feeling that the other big addition, the Changeling form where you turn into a beast, was similarly never thought out fully. So, I can turn into a cat or a beastman or a ... I know the manual calls it a Fury, but I can't help looking at the droopy ears on this one critter and not think "Muppet". That's neat the first few times, until you realize that there's no advantage to beast form besides slightly stronger attacks. By the time you've bought blades doing 80 hits per turn (and often with a much wider attack range or a faster hit rate), your beast form becomes woefully outclassed and unnecessary. You also don't have access to any of your powered-up magic once in beast form, with only your standard attack and one magic charging technique. You don't get to see anything special in the stage when you're in your Changeling form, you get no set of custom moves to experiment with, and you don't get any health or power boost by becoming a Muppet. Why bother?
Faring better are some of the other adjustments and additions to basic gameplay. The charging attack gives you a little more to think about with while slugging away, and the ability to use as many as six attacks (two buttons plus all four D-Pad directions) lets you use the varied abilities easier in combat than the dial-an-attack system from part 1. The variety of magic and abilities is strong again (one of the strengths of the original), with moves that can be used for freezing or poisoning or knocking back enemies, for charging your own blades, for performing crazy acrobatics, or any number of other techniques. The interface for managing your character has also been massively streamlined, making for easier item comparison and switching. The weapon and armor balance, on the other hand, is barely improved and in some ways not as good as the original. There's less variety in the weapons each character can hold (whereas before, you more often had choices of whether to go with quicker attacks or powerful strokes), and the weapon balance and experience leveling system is all out of whack -- depending on which character class you play as, you'll likely have a grossly overpowered warrior by the halfway mark. There are now five character classes instead of four, but there's still not a lot of variety or choice there. (By the by, why can't I choose male or female versions of any character? If I want to be an ass-kicking chick, I shouldn't be stuck with only two choices.) And though the gem system is still there for customizing armor and weapons, there are still are few really special items to find.
One place that The Warrior's Code slaughters its original is in mission design. The first game was purely fetch quests and boss battles, and while the second game doesn't add a lot more variety over the long haul, it at least feels more weighty because things are happening, and they're affecting the story. There are now escort and entourage missions where you'll be fighting side-by-side with other warriors. Some missions will have you seeking out characters to talk to, or tracking down levers to switch and embattlements to destroy. There are even a few puzzle elements now, such as when you must use a boss's attacks against him to trigger elemental containment pillars. Mini-bosses are still just giant-sized versions of regular soldiers, but the game's various boss battles are often unique and challenging encounters. Just the addition of event sequences makes all the difference -- it may not be "gameplay" when you are stopped from going down a path by a sudden avalanche, but at least it feels like something's happening in the world. And thanks to tremendous improvements in disc loading and significantly bigger levels (all tied together with a fast-travel map), it's much more fun exploring than it was last time.
One more key addition is online play. There was a gaping hole left in the first PSP game with just ad-hoc support, and Sony Online Entertainment is finally bringing the online experience it's known for (and named for) to PSP with the sequel. The choice of game types is impressive here, offering everything from typical slugfests and beast-killing bouts to greedy gold-collecting challenges to team events pairing you up for battle or races -- there's even a game of Capture the Flag. And, of course, there's the online (or offline wireless, if you have a friend nearby, for this or any other mode) play-through of the main quest. As is typical with realtime RPGs, multiplayer is fun but is also wildly unbalanced depending on who joins a game -- a few modes allow weaker players to struggle through, but most often, newbies will have no chance. Luckily, the online interface allows you to easily see what class levels you're going up against before you join a game, and you can arrange Friends' Lists or boot players to arrange the match-up you want. As a general time-waster, you could spend a lot of time playing The Warrior's Code online. However, the player cap of just four online is limiting, and as soon as you have four super-powered characters in a stage all using their magic at once against dozens of enemies, the game's engine starts to chug. And one big strike against it is the lack of in-game chat. The toggle-command responses you can send the other player aren't customizable or complex enough to carry on a conversation beyond yes, no, or taunt (and most players ignore commands anyway), and the lack of support for the PSP's new microphone headset means you will often be trudging through gigantic levels with now two players having no clue where to go instead of one.
As much an improvement the new multiplayer features make to Untold Legends 2, the single-player sticks out because of how little improved (and, in my opinion, devolved) the storytelling is from the original. Brotherhood of the Blade was simple in its story and dry in its telling, but at least it had a few plot twists and turns to keep things interesting. The Warrior's Code is almost a straightforward telling of good versus evil, with a heralded prince at the center that you must pave the way for. You are said to be the linchpin in the resistance's effort since you are of the rare breed of Changeling, but it matters little without conflict for the character in who to align with given that you possess this much power. And since the Changeling form makes so little difference in gameplay, you often forget that you have this power to begin with. Last time, there were sub-quests that you could take up, and you could choose your missions as you collected them; here, it's a linear plod through each story point -- you can't even talk to most townsfolk for your own fun. If you were bored by the tale told with the last Untold Legends, the addition of FMV and cinematics won't make this one more compelling.
Visually, The Warrior's Code is a big step up in use of special effects over the first Untold Legends, but it's competing against a heck of a lot on the system these days. Environments are still somewhat boxy and non-descript, and the game doesn't have the random-generating level feature to fall back on as before. There are more pieces of geometry added now to make the world feel more lifelike -- lots of crumbled castles and bubbling pits of lava and glistening crystals of ice stalagmites and steaming vent pipes -- but there still aren't very many clear landmarks or designed stage features to make orienting yourself on the map easy. If you're on a desert stage, you'll see the same sprawl of desert and rock throughout; if you are setting out to see a castle, you won't actually see the outside or any details of the castle until you load the stage from the generic gateway leading up to it. There are also a number of times when foreground things get in the way of the camera. The similar X-Men Legends 2 on PSP has the upper hand over Untold Legends 2 in a number of ways, but then again, that game took eons to load even the character menu, while Untold Legends 2 zips along with fast menus and speedy levels. And even if we're left wanting a little more, The Warrior's Code still makes for a sharp PSP game with its massive spell effects and detailed backgrounds. There are certainly some memorable moments to view -- I loved the catapult made out of an ogre with the yoke tied to his arms stretched in a Christ pose, and I loved the spinning sculpture in the game's early temple (it reminded me of Ogra from The Dark Crystal). The slowdown from part 1 has been dealt with handily, as you'll only see the game chug in multiplayer or some very intense critter encounters. Also, the ghosting from the simplistic textures used last time is cleaned up considerably. It's not by any means an ugly game on PSP, but it doesn't feel special anymore this second time out on a handheld, and the general design of characters and environments is still usually too uninventive and bland.
©2006-03-31, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved