Preview: Legend: Hand of God

Posted at: Thursday 7th August 2008 by Phil Hartup

Phil Hartup gets his clicking fingers ready to kill demons - Legend: Hand of God might not be Diablo 3, but it's still good fun.

After you have sat through some more generic plot – discovering who you are, and uncovering the meaning of life, the fun begins. You get down to the hard business of chopping monsters into pieces, exploring seemingly random holes in the ground and resolving the problems of people with exclamation marks floating over their heads.

SOME NEW IDEAS

It’s this aspect of Legend where some innovation starts to shine through. The first is the mouse pointer. Usually a mouse pointer is exactly that, but in Legend: Hand of God, the developers have instead made the pointer into a character, a light elf. This little Tinkerbelle-like character acts as a light source and new player guide rolled into one.

The second innovation is really the only thing that sets Legend apart from ancient 16-bit games: the visual presentation. We say visual presentation rather than graphics because the graphics themselves, despite being pretty, are nothing amazing. For example, the various inventory and skill selection screens are nothing we haven’t seen before. What makes Legend a step up from the norm however, is the quality of animation. Traditionally, if you meet a monster five time your height, you hack its shins and bite its ankles. You hack them hard. And that’s pretty much all you do. From Age of Conan back to Neverwinter Nights the gaming world is positively littered with the corpses of giants and dragons that have died due to vicious lower-leg wounds. Legend bucks this trend because the combat animations change depending on your opponent, which means that combat looks much more immersive. Not only do you see a good array of combat animations but you also get suitably gruesome finishing moves, which we never get bored of seeing. Legend also throws in some fairly advanced physics to add to the fun. For example when you find a severed head lying around you can kick it down the road like a football.

In the originality stakes Legend isn't going to win any awards. In fact it wouldn’t even be nominated, or even invited to the awards show. Legend is unapologetic for not being original. Apart from a few surprises here and there, this game is Diablo with a face lift. Even the goblin shaman resurrects his buddies in the same way as they did in Diablo 2. That’s not a bad thing though; if a company insists on waiting ages before releasing a sequel to their popular game, then they can expect another developer will cash in on this popularity with a game that’s the same in all but name.

Ultimately, Legend is the gaming equivalent of methadone for Diablo addicts. Anyone suffering from cold sweats and shakes in anticipation of Diablo 3 will find this game a pleasant short-term hit.

For more information and a demo of the Legend: Hand of God, see the official website.