Legend of Grimrock

Usually, you see the previews for something, get all excited, pre-order... and then are dissapointed to an extend that ranges from minor to massive. The Legend of Grimrock has restored the faith of this old gamer who, perhaps not old enough to enjoy Dungeon Master in it's hayday, certainly enjoyed Eye of the Beholder / Ishar / Knightmare, etc. on the Amiga. It's refreshing to see this brought into the modern era in such a refined and dignified way. The movement feels right ( almost reminiscent of Obitus, if anyone remembers that!!). The mechanics feel right, the combat is great (no idea what Jerry is talking about). Nostalgia overload, loving every minute!

I love the game mechanics, it is just like playing Eye of the Beholder again, just with much better graphics. The game is also very fun in the beginning. The first couple of levels are a blast. But as you play further, once quickly starts to feel that this game lacks any kind of depth. There are a lot of puzzles of varying difficulty levels to challenge you, but there is basically no real story here. I played through the game, but my enjoyment steadily dropped all the way through, and the game felt very repetitive after a short while. I've played through the entire EoB series countless times, but I don't think I am going to play this one again, it doesn't really have that much of a replay value once you finished it, even if you didn't find all the secrets on the first playthrough.

Legend of Grimrock harkens back to my early days of Might and Magic games, which likely puts me a little younger than a lot of you old gog'ers :) Nevertheless, Almost Human nails the vibe with creepy dungeons, tough monsters, and some gnarly puzzles. While holding true to some of the amazing elements of the old school fantasy action adventure games, the developers have updated it not only with some snazzy graphics, but real-time combat. There are both advantages and drawbacks to this real-time system. Against single enemies it is relatively easy to exploit the grid system and essentially dance around them as they try to orient themselves to attack. However, once there are multiple enemies (in addition to more complex abilities at their disposal, i.e. a gaseous attack that lingers in the area for a few rounds) each battle quickly becomes a fight for your life. The puzzles start out pretty simple with many hidden switches, pressure plates, and pitfalls, but quickly ramp up in complexity. Unfortunately, however, while complexity does increase, the types of puzzles remain relatively similar. Adding in some fantastic itemization, surprisingly deep character customization (for what it is) and the eventual possibility of user created and randomized dungeons, this game could easily get a long shelf life for many of us old-school gamers.

If you're wanting to play legend of Grimrock (from here on out called LOG), here's some detail from someone who has actually played the game (I downloaded it yesterday evening and played it well into the night - about 5 hours). My review will be based on that experience. I'm giving it 4 stars. The game does what it is designed to do very well. It is a dungeon crawl with puzzles and combat requiring awareness of your surroundings and being quick on your feet. There are, however, some things keeping it from being a 5 star game. But let's start with the good --> The good * LOG is easy to pickup and get started with. You can create a party of four and get right in the game quickly. * The attributes and skills for each character are easy to understand. Each has hover tips that explain what they do. Skills have the same thing. This makes it easy to know what you want to build a character to do. * LOG gives focus to a specific gameplay style - a dungeon crawl with puzzles and encounters requiring awareness and movement. It also has secrets hidden and rewards curiosity and exploration. As I said, it does this very well. * LOG keeps you on your toes and makes you think. If you're looking for a challenge in combat and puzzles, this game does not dissapoint. * The combat is simple, requiring mouse clicks on a character portrait area in the lower right to perform actions. --> The bad * LOG is very challenging. If you're looking for a casual dungeon crawl or hack fest, you will be dissapointed. The game requires you to solve puzzles and fight combat without just charing forward. * The combat being simple is good, but it has some flaws. First is you have to right click on the character portrait area to perform an attack. It seems much more intuitive to use the left click to perform an attack as most games do this. I find myself unequipping weapons during combat rather than using them becuase I left click on the portrait (which is the command to remove the weapon)... I'm surprised this was not play tested and picked up on. * The spell rune system is neat, but I find with the frantic pace of combat and not being able to pause the game, my mage mostly gets one spell off before combat, and then has a hard time doing more spells due to requiring clicking multiple runes and firing off the spell each time. I would have loved spell hot keys, or at least having my previous runes saved. * Some might not like that mistakes are met with swift penalty. Some monsters poison, others disease, and as far as I can tell, there are no cure magic spells (only potions) to cure these. * Enemy monsters do not have a health bar. It would be nice to know how close something is to death... --> Final thoughts I've only played about 5 hours of the game and my characters are almost level 5. I'm on dungeon level 4 (just got there). It is a challenging game, both in puzzles and combat. I do like the challenge. But there are some things that could use fixing to make the game more enjoyable - especially using left click for combat, and saving spell runes. I'd also love it if the enemy monsters had a health bar of some kind.

I think this is a mediocre game. If you compare it to the much older Dungeon Master (which was probably the main inspiration for this game) then the only thing that is really done better in this "sequel" is the automapping feature. Fights, classes (where's the healer?), spells, all of that is worse in this game then it was in DM. It feels like this game would need another thousand of manhours to bring it to the same level as DM. (Maybe released too soon?)