Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader

It was difficult to subdue the nostalgia that would've otherwise driven me to give this mess a 4/5 review. But reviews should be honest, and new players will not have the benefit of Lionheart being one of the first games they ever played. It has its charm - the art direction is nice, the city of Barcelona feels alive when you first loiter around it, the music, while composed of pretty short loops is pretty and fits the aesthetic (the guitar theme lives in my head rent free). It doesn't shy away from tackling pretty serious topics of persecution, and, for the most part, does them justice, and it has a nice breadth of choices and builds one can dive into, for added replayability and fun. It is, however, unfinished, and by the halway point into the game, the quality starts to drop. It becomes more of a grind, of your character going through megadungeons filled with more and more enemies and less and less story, while the difficulty ramps. The final act of the game is severely disappointing, and feels rushed - because it was rushed. There are also some technical problems. Sometimes when you load into the game, your attack speed goes down, while keeping the same inaccuracy from your higher chosen speed. Positioning of enemies can be wonky, like them shooting at your character from inside the wall. But generally, nothing a quick reload wouldn't be able to fix. The difficulty curve is punishing, and the game doesn't indicate in any way how your skill levels relate to the actual difficulty of whatever you're trying to accomplish. I honestly recommend, if you want to try the game - it is very much combat centric, and if you try to spec into more of a charismatic character, like you would in other RPGs, you will suffer in the later parts of the game. So yeah. The game clearly had potential, I would love to see more in the world created for it, but the execution is lacking.

I had Lionheart once and stopped playing but I didn't remember why. Then I bought here on GOG to play again and then I remembered why. The game has a great appeal for his SPECIAL engine, similar to the great Fallout, and i thought to myself: Black isle, SPECIAL engine, medieval setting... this has everything to be a great game. but it was not. The game starts great (only reason I didn't gave 1 star), you have Barcelona to explore and meet various characters (Da Vinci, Gallileo, Shakespeare etc.), starts some sub plots. But once you in a faction, the good game ends. You leave Barcelona behind and start a dungeon crawling spree where only combat skills and perks are important. Bad for me, for I choose Speech/Barter for one of my tag skills. At some point, I thought we could have some rest of this killing spree and reach a city where you can talk to people and restock your potions. But you don't. I left Barcelona with 30 healing potion and that's it. You will be dependant of the spirit essence, witch id RARE. The game resume in: Explore, find a bunch of enemies, kill them (witch took 30 seconds more or less) and wait 10 minutes to recover. 40 hours of gameplay, 30 hours you spend waiting to recover (maybe its just me, but i find the combat really dificult, most enemies has insane critical rate). I was about to give up, but I wanted to see the ending so I gathered all patience and... finished it. Really sad, Lionheart had everything to be a awesome game.

Lionhearts story is interesting twist on our past and there are a nmber of good quests at the start. The game was rushed out with the second have of the game feeling barren with few quests. The whole feel of the gmae felt unfinished the animation felt wooden. The music would repeat itself so much that after a while i would turn off music. It is a shame given more time and money i think this would have been a really good game.

One of the classic RPGs that was highly under rated during its time. Developed by the groups that made Fallout, it had plenty of freedom, unfortuantly unlike Fallout it bottlenecked at specific points in the story line, resulting in difficulty if you had not prepared yourself well enough. Storyline was excellent and the way history was deviated and warped to fit the story was fascinating if you knew the people and places of Europe during the 16th/17th century. The magical element was also exceptional. If you like mixing fantasy with history then this is well worth a look at, especially if you want a story line and world that is both unique and fascinating.

I like but this is a long lost game from childhood that i've just found so i don't know how it really holds up for other people!