Elven Legacy Early Impressions

Elven Legacy is essentially a fantasy themed, turn-based strategy game that has very old-school intentions in its game design. That's either a plus or minus for you based on your history with the genre. It is not a HoMM clone, so if you're hoping for a sleeper hit along the lines of King's Bounty (also published by 1C) I'd look elsewhere. Elven Legacy focuses squarely on the combat aspect of TBS games and plays more like a fantasy-tinged version of Panzer General, complete with a hex-based grid for movement. Although you navigate on a world map, there's no collection of resources or army management to speak of. Troops are requisitioned simply by buying them. Money, which is gained by pillaging enemy towns,  is the only resource in the game. For me that's a positive, since the resource and city management of these type of games usually bogs me down a bit.

There is a story in Elven Legacy and thankfully it is not delivered in Russian like the tutorials. There are three parts to the main campaign with Elven, Orc and Human chapters that play out in a linear fashion on a large world map. Sometimes you're given the choice between several paths as you make your way across the map, but I didn't notice any major consequences to my decisions over my first 4 hours of gameplay. The story is pretty hammy, with terrible voice acting and lots of pop-up talking-heads dialogue during missions but it's too early to make a call on the overall story-arc at the moment. I'm currently still making my way through the Elven missions and its got the usual cliches of Elven superiority and distrust towards humans. The main Elven heroes do seem a little more evil then I'd normally expect in a fantasy world, with a gestapo-like tendencies when it comes to dealing with other races.

Elven Legacy's main focus though is on the combat and what's there is a solid, if extremely difficult experience. Even on easy you'll find yourself reloading some of the early missions till you get the hang of things. There's not a whole lot of unit to unit healing in the game, at least from the time I've spent with it, instead units regain their strength by resting instead of attacking. Since you can only rest a unit as long as it hasn't moved during a turn you'll often end up with front line troops that get pinned in lines of fire and useless because you need to rest them to keep them alive. Since enemy units can also rest in-between moves it's important to finish off weaker units when you have the chance. This leads you to some make some dangerous gambits when attacking weaker units after they've retreated near friends. Since you'll spend a decent part of the game attacking well-defended strongholds this can get very risky and it's not uncommon to lose a fully healed unit in one move if you allow him to stray too far from the flock.

As old-school as the combat feels it's the games visuals that will really take you back in time. Elven Legacy is not a pretty game. While the units are fairly varied, I wouldn't feel guilty commenting that the game looks like it came out five years ago. The sound in the game is equally limited. Although there is a large amount of voice-work in the game, it's horrible on the whole and often hampered by a bug where the dialogue will run into itself, cutting off the final words from the previous speech. Swoosh sounds from arrows flying in the sky sound like something you invented to give reality to your action-figures in your childhood. If dated visuals and sound bother you in any way, I can safely urge you away from Elven Legacy. 

Although I've only put one long night into the game so far I feel safe in saying I'd only recommend Elven Legacy to the most stalwart and hungry turn-based-strategy fans. With its difficulty and decidedly blast-from-the-past combat model the game seems pigeon-holed to a specific audience of gamers. You masochist, used to play table-top gamers know who you are. For everyone else though, I'd look elsewhere; possibly to last year's King's Bounty, which is a much more consistent experience.