courtesy of ign
What you might not expect about handheld gaming is that it is a gateway to experiences you might never have taken to otherwise in your gaming life. A role-playing adventure at home on a console is 20-60 hours sitting in front of the television set; with a portable, it's your daily trip on a MUNI bus and some lazy weekend hours spent not doing other things. Personally, the Baldur's Gate-style dungeon crawler is the type of addiction that I've tried to stay sober of -- especially after seeing gamers get burnt out on the flurry of action-RPG games last year (including three for PS2 in a month's time.) But on a portable, it's a different story -- the play sessions are more loose, the goals are easier to set aside for your next break, and the prospects another few gamers jumping into the action is a good enough reason to not be without the game.
We knew that Sony Online Entertainment's Untold Legends would be just the kind of game that fans of Champions of Norrath would slay for on PlayStation Portable. But it wasn't until after our latest play session with the game, when I looked down at our notebook and realized we hadn't put the PSP down at all over a two-hour period to write anything about the game, that I realized the hold it had. The game isn't a significant break from the genre in any way, but with its gameplay geared towards both short burst of play and prolonged journeys over its vast adventure, complemented by dazzling graphics and beckoning multiplayer features, this handheld game may lure in a whole new crowd of adventure seekers.
Nearly finished and ready for a simultaneous launch with PlayStation Portable this March, the depth of the adventure unfolded before us in our extended playtime. The game is built around the hub city of Aven, where players can engage conversation with NPC villagers, trade wares and buy weapons, and take up quests for the good of this besieged town. An imposing 110 stage zones sprawl across the huge game map -- there are so many areas in the game that you'll need to unlock the gates to teleporters so that you can reach the outskirts of the land. 25 story quests will take you across much of this world, with 20 side-quests and a number of dungeons to explore beyond the game's initial 15-20 hours of play.
Control in the game closely mimics PS2 games such as SOE's own Champions of Norrath. To deal with the PSP's lower numbers of buttons, the R trigger is used as a shift key that changes the function of every button on the PSP, allowing you to use your special abilities or adjust the camera on the same buttons you're already pounding away on. Health potions are on the L trigger, for instance, but hitting the shift trigger gives you access to magic potions. Attacks and secondary abilities are handled on the rightside buttons, with X being the main hack-and-slash button instead of the sometimes-sticky Square. Movement is handled with the analog controller (and seems incredibly apt for this sort of game -- the short range of movement on that analog nub will make some gamers have to adjust in other games, but here, your thumb melds with the controller), with the D-Pad working as a chooser for magic abilities.
We had our butts handed to us in the CES demo (our lowly beginner knight was no match for the legions of enemies thrown out in that version, and the laughing mockery of the booth babe handling the game didn't help pick up our spirits), but playing the full game made the game balance much more clear. Like Champions, there are both arcade and RPG elements to the gameplay -- you can get deep and button mash or dodge-and-shoot for a good deal of the quest without dabbling too deep into the options beyond simply picking up stuff and equipping it, but later stages make the gear much more apparent. One particular dungeon in our play session, for instance, threw multiple armed skeletons at us (numbers of marauders is very, very common in this game, and the PSP graphics engine handles dozens of characters large and small with no hitch in framerate.) Each had more HP than we could handle by just melee attacks, and one had a bow that it used to harm us while we were in the thick of the fight. Using a stone that temporarily turns baddies to stone, we were able to divide and conquer, getting to the sniper by freezing one of the more vicious thugs before we sustained too much damage.
The game is loaded with these kinds of abilities that can add a bit more skill for the strategic player -- one attack called the Mind Wrack made enemies insane and weak for the duration of its effect, but if you aren't able to kill the beast in the time that Mind Wrack moves through their brains, the enemy will be able to focus itself and be stronger than ever after the spell wears off. Also, the suffix system of items allows you to customize almost anything you collect -- a certain stone may give your sword one ability, but it may also allow you to move faster with a heavy load if attached to your boots, or might give raise your armor strength if attached to the breastplate or the helmet. Each of the game's four character classes can use a variety of weapons, with special weapons and items available only to certain character classes -- the Druid can even raise one of three pets, which can attack enemies or be a magnet for pain you don't want inflicted upon yourself.
From here on out, it's a matter of polish for SOE -- the team behind Untold Legends were one of the first to be able to work with PSP development kits, and it shows in the completion level and handheld-tailored game design. We'll be taking another look at Untold Legends to bring you deeper details on the multiplayer features of the game later on in anticipation of its release this March.
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