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Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader - cover art
Glitchwave rating
2.77 / 5.0
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25 Ratings / 1 Reviews
#211 for 2003
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Usually the mere mention of Black Isle Studios makes my mouth water no matter what role in the production of a videogame they may be occupying. Although they've let me down in a couple of occasions, I've yet to meet any game that is even remotely close to their best works, Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment. I had previously ignored the existence of this particular game, however, as not only had the reviews and reactions to it been fairly lukewarm but I had played a demo back when we were nearing a release date and, although I remember enjoying it, I was never won over enough to worry about getting the game, until a few months ago. Why? Dunno, I was just looking for something to play that I hadn't before. Naturally I came to this game with some trepidation although I was also expecting to find a gem that suffered the fate of excessive hype, and for a while I thought I had found one, but eventually I had to yield and say that the general reaction was pretty accurate.

The game doesn't really feature much of a story so much as a context to which it loosely ties a classic "evil menace" arc. Basically, the game is set in an alternate version of the Renaissance, centuries after a Pandora's Box event took place in the Crusades and released all sorts of demons and magic into the world, which by this time had settled and life could almost resume as normal. Incidentally, the mythology proposed by the game is actually very interesting, dealing a lot more with zoroastrian beliefs and actually connecting them with a fair naturalism to the proposed historical setting. In this context you play as a descendant of Richard the Lionheart, the man responsible for having closed the portal which brought all those creatures into this world all that time ago, and who has to stop some villain from opening the rift again.

To be honest I can't say too much in its favour as just about every positive aspect it once had was in some way or another abused of or completely dispatched with later on in the game. As it starts, you're brought into the massive city of Barcelona by none other than Leonardo da Vinci to seek for aid after some assassins are sent after you. This part of the game is quite open and non-linear, offering a load of sub-quests and a generally wide array of areas to explore, basically all following the Baldur's Gate formula, which is all good. To be honest, very few of these tasks are really all that interesting - precisely what made these work in Baldur's Gate II was that each one of them had their own twists and interesting details so that in the end they were practically stories of their very own and not merely sidequests, whereas in Lionheart this feels mostly like work as an glorified deliveryboy or killer, but generally it's more diversity and more freedom of action so I can appreciate that somewhat. However, what did irk me about these is that most of the time they involved any number of historical figures that made me feel like I was playing Midnight (or -day, maybe? It never gets dark, ever) in the Renaissance instead - so there's already da Vinci, but you also get to meet Hernán Cortez, William Shakespeare, Niccolò Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, Guy Fawkes, Miguel de Cervantes, and later on even Joan of Arc as a zombie, among many many others, all of them played as utterly horrible caricatures: so Leonardo da Vinci is the eccentric with thousands of magical inventions and contraptions, Miguel de Cervantes is driven mad by his own writings, screaming out "LA BESTÍA!!!!" (with an accent on the "I" instead of the "E" - you could at least get the pronounciation right, couldn't you?) all throughout his quest (which actually involves him coming along with you for some time), and William Shakespeare is a hopeless romantic who utters pompous, cheesy, self-absorbed drivel just to greet the character. I take some comfort in having been able to kill a few of these guys earlier or later in the game.

But that's just Barcelona, it's only half of the game, really. Up to that point it doesn't seem like a total disaster, it's actually fairly entertaining despite all its flaws. It's once you move out of Barcelona and its surroundings, though, that the game completely loses it. Before I started recurring to a walkthrough to see just where in the game's length I was standing, I actually thought Barcelona was all setup and we were just about to embark on the actual story, but it turns out that's about as much "story" you'll ever get to see. Essentially, the rest of the game is Diablo syndrome at its worst, a load of non-stop hack n' slash through extremely vast, sprawling multi-level dungeons. On an MSN session with a friend, he once asked me what games I thought married story and gameplay correctly, and I gave the Black Isle games as an example, to which he answered something along the lines that it was not a good example since the story was actually told through dialogues and patches through the hacking and slashing, to which I never had a chance to respond. The fact is that all that dialogue and story is in many ways preventing one from becoming too aware of the gameplay mechanics, and prevent the game from turning into what is seemingly a routinary, monotonous point-and-click excercise. Some would say this is bad gameplay but I disagree, as I greatly enjoyed trudging through countless dungeons in that game, and if there was any criticism I could level against, say, the Icewind Dale saga, it's not that it's boring and non-engaging. In these cases it works because the games cleverly conceal their devices by diverting some of the attention to other aspects, towards creating expectations and a future payoff, the characters and therefore also the player's motivations become teleological. In the case of Lionheart, you never have much of an idea of why you are where you are and where are you actually going, beyond some abstract idea of saving the world from some evil being or another, and thus the focus is entirely in the present, in the action of hacking and slashing, of clicking away till either one is dead, and then looking for another victim to click to death upon. It's systematic and tedious beyond belief, and even pathetic to some point - there is an almost Sisyphean quality in seeing yourself spending weeks lumbering through an entire eight-level dungeon just to reach yet another eight-level dungeon, with no sight or further knowledge of your goal, with nothing gained in the end. At this point, the fact that the game keeps itself as steadily challenging as it is is no longer a quality, it only adds to the nightmare as you cannot move swiftly and directly into the next act.

The length of the dungeons is just another problem none of the previous Black Isle games seemed to have (well, except the Dark Alliances). In their previous games, dungeons kept themselves intricate and challenging but never too long, at most two or three very expansive levels, and this generally led to me never reaching the point of exhaustion with these. Moreover, when these offered as much visual creativity and diversity as their Infinity Engine games did, one was always interested in what he'd find in a following level - there was a genuine sense of exploration to be found. Lionheart's dungeons - no, actually, the whole of it, even forests and cities and whatnot - all seem alike, all feel extremely bland and, worse, lazy. Lazy on about every aspect. Barcelona is presented as a great metropolis, as a place of wonder and great riches, yet what you find inside are very common-looking houses, unimpressive buildings one recognizes as castles and cathedrals because that's what they tell you they are, and is all tainted in different drab brown colours. In the case of returning to the city when it's been invaded, some of these buildings have been broken down, some wooden barriers are put up, and there are some enemies to be found on the streets - where is the wonder, the splendour in the first, or alternatively all the grit and looming doom in the second? This is, incidentally, the best-looking area of them all. But as I said, it's not just the art that's lazy, everything about it is. I have never been one to pay too much attention to graphics and technical details, to my mind the Infinity Engine still looks better than many of the games I've played which were created in more recent years, but boy, every place here looks as it's been designed on the Age of Empires editor, with areas made of a basic tileset and houses and trees just randomly pasted on top. The limits between the house and the streets all seem choppy and inorganic, and thus the game is their worst-looking since the first Baldur's Gate back in 1998. The sound is generally even worse. There is no enviromental sound at all! The sounds are essentially the battle noises and a rubbish, derivative soundtrack which seems to have been pasted entirely at random in the back. If anything, the one technical aspect Black Isle could take pride in was always sound, with the eerie, highly complex enviroments, Mark Morgan's ominous soundscapes and superb voicework from the part of a cast which included people like David Warner, Dan Castallenata, Mark Hammill and Rob Paulsen among so many others. There was a sense of proportion and an immersive quality in what was produced earlier - this, in contrast, is absolutely flat.

It's true that this game has not been developed by Black Isle, instead by Reflexive Entertainment of whom I know little of, and that at the time Black Isle released this game, they were having serious difficulties with Interplay which eventually led to getting the lot sacked and the studio shut down that same year. It definitely feels like a rushed work, though, one which was only half-written and then stitched through a load of standard dungeons in the hopes it all led somewhere, but even many of the encounters in Barcelona make me wonder if this would have been any better regardless. The idea and the proposed context certainly seemed promising, and maybe in some future someone could take a stab at the idea again and produce something of real worth, but this definitely isn't the one.
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algroth_89 2017-07-23T07:27:56Z
2017-07-23T07:27:56Z
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Note: this review was written by me back in 2011. Though some opinions may have changed since and it could use a rewrite, I simply don't feel this game is worth a second playthrough or the effort to update what I wrote above. Take some of my general remarks about gameplay and visuals and so on with a grain of salt.
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Catalog

eliottstaten Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2024-03-11T01:07:00Z
2024-03-11T01:07:00Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
HadrianPlotka Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2024-01-07T23:34:52Z
2024-01-07T23:34:52Z
2.5
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Fet Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-10-31T20:34:04Z
Windows
2023-10-31T20:34:04Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
my_granny Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-10-29T10:58:01Z
2023-10-29T10:58:01Z
1.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
2003 Windows
Calyk Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-10-14T20:08:14Z
2023-10-14T20:08:14Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
altertide0 Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-09-20T21:43:40Z
2023-09-20T21:43:40Z
2.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
s_sothoth Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-08-19T20:57:16Z
2023-08-19T20:57:16Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
icyhxvrs Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-06-13T05:30:27Z
2023-06-13T05:30:27Z
1.5
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
RPG
crapballa Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-02-16T22:27:15Z
2023-02-16T22:27:15Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
1068396 Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-01-29T16:35:59Z
Windows
2023-01-29T16:35:59Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Flight_Sensations Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-01-25T23:08:08Z
2023-01-25T23:08:08Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Hazy Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader 2023-01-03T12:36:07Z
2023-01-03T12:36:07Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Content rating
ESRB: T
Player modes
Single-player
Media
2x CD-ROM

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  • davidraccoon 2023-08-12 03:01:40.246841+00
    I don't understand why so many people dislike this one. It was one of my favorites as a teenager and it totally holds up. Interesting story and game mechanics. Great ambiance, good voice acting...
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