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.
