Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade Review

It’s all about the body count. While right-wingers and the more excitable sections of the media work themselves into a frenzy over GTA’s badly-animated fornication, Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade sets about being controversial in an altogether more traditional way. Rarely has an angry fantasy hero gone about a murderous killing spree with so much conviction, or such obvious delight. With a body count that quickly runs into the thousands and then rapidly off the scale, Untold Legends quickly sets out its pitch for murder sim of the year, and then some.

Of course, it’s all gleeful fantasy nonsense, and as such unlikely to trouble our self-appointed moral guardians. Untold Legends may boast a murder rate higher than Harold Shipman at a retirement home Christmas party, but it’s so cartoony and so ridiculous that few are likely to get at all worked up about it. Besides, all that killing turns out to be strangely therapeutic.

Untold Legends, then, is a blood-soaked hack ‘n’ slash fantasy RPG in the grand tradition of Champions of Norrath, and slavishly adheres to as many genre staples as it can. As well as the ritual slaughter of thousands of generic cannon fodder enemies, the game boasts a ridiculous fantasy plot, a healthy smattering of “thee”s and “thou”s, a brace of demanding townsfolk, a staggering array of inventory items and a very large number of fetch and carry quests. Playing the game invariably involves obtaining a ridiculous quest from a local NPC, descending into a dark dungeon to retrieve a mystical artefact, massacring everything in your path, and staggering home under the weight of accumulated booty. Sell the loot, complete the quest, lather, rinse, repeat. Job done. All this is achieved with the aid of a graphics engine that’s competent rather than inspired, a musical soundtrack that does the job without becoming intrusive, and a sensible if slightly cluttered set of controls.

The big difference here is that Untold Legends is the first game of its kind on a handheld, and this has clearly impacted the design in a number of different ways. Perhaps surprisingly, this has mostly worked in the game’s favour. The epic plots and convoluted quests of Champions of Norrath and the console Baldur’s Gate games have been shelved in favour of small, self-contained missions that can generally be completed in around fifteen minutes or less. Later missions increase in length, but they still involve navigating a series of short dungeons in sequence, making it easy to keep track of what you’re up to. At every stage the game is happy to remind you exactly where you’re supposed to be going and why, and the map is small enough to navigate around with a minimum of fuss. Untold Legends lends itself extremely well to short sessions of play, and even after an absence of a few days it’s easy enough to get back into the game. Plus – hallelujah! – you can save at any point. Game designers, take note.

As a result, Untold Legends doesn’t feel like it’s been cut down too badly from its console brethren. In several critical ways, it has, of course: there are fewer character types, smaller skill trees, and the game’s dungeons appear to be randomly strung together from basic building blocks rather than carefully hand-crafted. For the most part, however, it doesn’t really matter. Played in short bursts of half an hour or so, the constant carnage has a rhythm all of its own and there’s real satisfaction to be gained from discovering new map locations and customising your weaponry. If you’re lucky enough to be able to play wirelessly with a few friends, Untold Legends is basically a Gauntlet for the modern age.

Where the game does fall down slightly is in its balancing. If you’re diligent about selling unwanted items, it’s far too easy to amass a fortune in gold very quickly, and this means it’s possible to stock up with enough health potions to overcome almost any eventuality. This in turn removes most of the challenge from the game, which adds to its charm as a pick-up-and-play title but also means things become repetitive later on. Strategy takes a back seat to simply wading in and lamping things as hard as possible – and in multiplayer things are even easier. Technical issues also detract from the fun, with occasional hitches in frame rate and some inordinately long loading times between major areas. Both the difficulty level and the technical problems are likely to be due to rushed development rather than any deep-rooted flaws, but they’re disappointing nonetheless.

Ultimately, Untold Legends falls firmly in the middle rank of the PSP’s launch titles: it’s fun enough to be entertaining in short bursts, and it’s lengthy enough to last a fair while, but with its sketchy plot and mix-and-match dungeons there’s no denying that for most people the game will get repetitive before they reach the end. In many ways, this feels like an interim product, a proof of concept: it proves that hack ‘n’ slash RPGs can work well on a handheld and it does a lot of things right, though it does feel slightly unfinished and rough around the edges. The fact that there are already firm plans in place for two sequels suggests that SOE itself has faith that Untold Legends isn’t about to become Unsold Legends, and with a proper storyline and some additional depth, there’s no reason why this couldn’t become a franchise to watch.