legacy of the crusader

Are the people responsible for this mess the same ones that brought us such classics as Fallout, Baldur's Gate and fucking Planescape? I have been playing this game since the weekend, and depressingly I am not that far into it because of the glaring technical and design issues that are in the way of what should have been a fantastic RPG.

I hadn't heard much about this game until the hype machine started up before it's release a couple weeks ago. Strangely enough, Interplay never showed this game at E3. Foreshadowing events to come? You bet your ass.

Upon starting the game up, you are presented with a stylish still painting intro similar to Icewind Dale. The story behind the game is a refreshing spin on historical events that happened during the Crusades. It explained two important things: how magic became part of everyday life, and why there are a lot of evil things running around.

The character creation process is fairly detailed and uses the familiar SPECIAL (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) system from the Fallout series. You have a choice of four races: Human, Demonkin, Feralkin, and Sylvant (magic-touched). There wasn't much in the way of customizing character appearance, but I chose to ignore that. You can also select a Divine, Demonic or Feral spirit companion that will determine the type of magic you will be able to use within the game. After choosing some attributes and skills that bear a striking resemblance to Fallout, you begin the game. You start as an outcast somewhere in Spain, and the Inquisition has determined you to be a deviant magic-user and must be put to death. It seems that anyone with magical abilities is frowned upon in this newly changed world. Fair enough, I'll be on my way to my first quest. And here is where the problems begin.

You see, low-res graphics may have been acceptable, say, five years ago. But this is 2003, for fuck's sake. And without the ability to change the resolution - or many other hardware related tweaks for that matter - pissed me off from the get go. The environment of Barcelona (the first City you start in) is nice enough, but the graphics really show their age. At this point in the game though I was still willing to give it a chance. After all, I hadn't even received my first quest yet. But then the load screens start showing up. I mean honestly, Diablo II was flawless in the sense that every transition to a new area (minus each Act of course) was pretty seamless. The loading screens are pretty generic looking too, and are jarring enough to unseat you from the RPG experience. Not good.

So I get my first quest, which was to rescue the brother of a little girl who happened to be hanging around a sewer. Apparently he's inside. Fair enough, I go down expecting the game to take off. Instead though, it seems that the developers decided to take all rational thought out of creating the combat engine. Combat is in real time, but it plays like shit. It's stilted and incredibly unwieldy - the low resolution and clumsy oversized interface make you scroll around looking for where that poisonous slime is being flung from, while taking melee damage from countless enemies. I had to restart the game about four different times, creating characters I expected would perform well in melee combat. In this respect the game is essentially forcing you to create a melee character. Despite all this I got my ass handed to me many times. The enemy speeds are inhuman, and they come at you from all angles. You can't issue combat or spell commands while the game is paused or adjust the game speed. When it's you versus a bunch of swarming monsters, the lack of this functionality becomes a pain in the ass pretty fast. Better get used to that quick reload.

After having a good playtest of this game, I'm wondering what they were really trying to do. It tries to be Planescape, Baldur's Gate and Diablo all at once with poor results. In fact, the Lion's head logo is reminiscent of the Lady of Pain from Planescape. The sounds also seem to have been lifted from Black Isle's D&D games. The added salt in this already gaping hole though are the slowdowns that occur. There is no way you can tell me this game running at 800x600 should need all my resources. The engine is basically five years old! And I haven't even touched the number of bugs yet or the alpha-like Multiplayer code. Apparently the press didn't even get a review copy of this game before it went retail. It's like admitting you're going to dump a pile of steaming crap onto PC gamers everywhere.

Lionheart is definitely not up to Black Isle's standards. Releasing this game in the state that it's in is a god damned shame. I expected a lot more. Going with Reflexive entertainment to develop the title (the makers of Zax the Alien Hunter and Star Trek: Away Team...good god) was probably a mistake, but I guess Bioware had its hands full. I am being completely honest when I say I really wanted to like this game. Given Black Isle's pedigree I had myself convinced it was still a solid title. Regardless of all this I may keep playing, since the optimist in me - however deeply hidden - wants to believe. The masochist in me would probably help, too. But I really doubt it can get much better.