Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1

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Review:

Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble (not to be confused with Legendary Wars on mobile devices, which is an unrelated game) is a Real-Time Strategy game first released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, which was later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. In this game, players command a tribe of cave men as they hunt for supplies and fend off attacks from dinosaurs.

The presentation here is decent, using mostly 2D visuals with a little 3D for larger dinosaurs and some environmental features. This is backed by a somewhat subdued soundtrack and joined by various grunts for you caveman units. This isn’t going to be even remotely impressive by today’s standards, but it works well enough for the game, for the most part. My only real complaint is that it’s difficult to tell at a glance what type of unit each of your cavemen are.

On paper, this game has many of the important core elements of Real-Time Strategy games. You have unit management and resource management, units for collecting resources and units for fighting enemies, areas to harvest resources, the ability to quickly click on a spot on the map to move the view there, and the ability to individually select units or select entire groups, even allowing players to draw a circle around these units to do so.

In practice, this game has far more issues. Yes, you can farm one type of resource, food, and you can find other types of resources, but the resources needed for more advanced unit types seem to be far harder to come by. You can select groups and assign them to tasks, but their pathfinding is horrible, and they will often go off-task because they don’t know how to get to the other side of an enemy where there’s still room to attack them, or fail to harvest food because they apparently can’t see it and need to be manually told to grab it. And while you can manually select groups, you cannot choose to simply select all units on-screen, or all of a specific type of unit. In addition, your viewing window is small, and the overall maps are small too.

As a result, while this game appears on the surface to have all of the parts needed for a solid Real-Time Strategy game, when you actually try to play it like one you’ll find it is an absolute mess, with units that need to be constantly babysat, with a frequent need for a kind of unit that you just cannot find the resource for, and with the constant frustration of having to struggle to select the specific units you want to use.

Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble is a game that has some good ideas about how to do a Real-Time Strategy game on Nintendo’s handheld, but those ideas are all poorly-implemented in ways that make this game a pain to play. Even though there aren’t many great options when it comes to Real-Time Strategy games on Nintendo 3DS, I can’t give this game a high recommendation, even to fans of the genre.

tl;dr – Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble is a Real-Time Strategy game where players command a tribe of cavemen searching for food and fighting dinosaurs. This game manages to do the basics of a Real-Time Strategy game on Nintendo 3DS, but it does them very poorly, and with enough frustrating issues that it makes this a difficult game to recommend, as you’re more likely to be frustrated by its flaws than thrilled by its gameplay.

Grade: C-

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