Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown

Genre: First-Person Dungeon-Crawler / Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Pineapple Works)

Legends of Amberland is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler RPG originally released on PC in 2019 and brought to the Nintendo Switch in 2020. This is a game that approaches the genre looking to bank on the nostalgic appeal of the genre’s decades-old roots while modernizing things just enough to be relevant in the modern day. Fans of the genre who still have fond memories of old-school Wizardry and Ultima games may find Legends of Amberland to be designed specifically to tap into that nostalgia.

Having said that, while this game does an amazing job of making great use of nostalgia, one of the game’s greatest weaknesses is that it does very little to strike out on its own and do something unique or memorable in its own right. I know I usually get into the habit of waiting until nearly the end of a review to write the negatives of a game, but this time it’s kinda’ hard to avoid, because this is a flaw that’s present in nearly every facet of the game – it is in many respects a game that feels very generic, at times even aggressively so.

Take the presentation, for example. This game uses colorful sprite-based visuals that mimic a 3D landscape, with extremely low-resolution pixel art character sprites. This low-fidelity presentation was clearly intentional, again a part of that greater thrust to aim for nostalgia, and in this it largely succeeds, as playing this game instantly brings back fond but fuzzy memories. Not of any specific game, mind you, but the genre as a whole. Unfortunately, virtually everything here feels like a version of something I’ve seen countless times elsewhere. There is not a single character, monster, or location that manages to be memorable enough that I’ll remember what it looks like a few months from now. This is all bog-standard medieval fantasy fare, and while it works brilliantly at capturing a snapshot of the genre’s roots, it doesn’t seem to be doing much with those roots.

The music here is decent chiptune fare, although it quickly gets repetitive, and once again there’s nothing truly memorable about it. And while the story starts out on a good note, with an interesting mystery about a crown magically enchanted to be forgotten by everyone, there’s nothing truly compelling in this game’s writing or characters beyond that opening premise, as the rest of the world has been filled with standard medieval fantasy tropes. After playing this game for hours, I couldn’t name one memorable character or line of dialogue in this game for the life of me. Again, there’s nothing here that’s truly terrible, but there’s also nothing that stands out.

At the very least I can say that the gameplay does one thing that does stand out, and that is how this game modernizes the genre in its classic form. While you can certainly find more modern games in the genre in recent years, such as the Etrian Odyssey titles on the Nintendo DS and 3DS, Legends of Amberlin is fairly unique in that it has one foot squarely planted in the past with the other close to the modern day.

Like in the classic games of the genre, players will be building a party from scratch from standard genre classes and races, selecting combat options from a menu, and exploring a large overworld map with labyrinthine dungeons. However, this game does a umber of things to help streamline the process.

Don’t want to spend a while agonizing over your party’s buildup? The game gives you the option of letting it roll up a well-rounded party for you. Not feeling like going through the motions of combat with simple and easy enemies? The game has a quick and easy “fight” button that will just repeat the last action a character did in combat with one button press. Worried about getting lost in those labyrinthene dungeons? A convenient mini-map is on-screen at all times to keep you from getting lost, and you can always check a larger map of areas you’ve been to when you need to. Need to head back to a town or dungeon but don’t want to have to trudge through the wilderness for the umpteenth time? Early on players can unlock a fast-travel option they can use at any time they’re not nearby an enemy. And not only can players save anywhere, the game makes use of an autosave feature too, just in case.

This streamlining helps players to focus on the meat of the genre, the core element that makes it fun – exploring the world, collecting loot, and building up your characters. In this regard, the game has plenty to offer, with a large world that has a decent variety in its locations, and a good variety of loot to collect as well, although nothing that’s going to come close to the likes of games with randomized loot like Diablo and Torchlight.

However, while this game does a good job with its core fundamentals, and the steps taken to modernize it make it a breeze to play, there are still areas I feel like this game could have done with more modernization. For example, one of the old-fashioned things this game does is that magical characters learn magic spells automatically when they level up (leveling up, incidentally, can only be done when speaking to a trainer in a town, something the game doesn’t clearly explain to players), and it would have been nice to be given some sort of utility in that process – even a simple skill tree would have been a nice touch. Also, buying items in shops is made very inconvenient by there being no way to directly compare the equipment you’re considering to the equipment a character is wearing. And while the mini-map is pretty convenient, it unfortunately doesn’t show the location of enemies as they shuffle around.

Oh, and when it comes to those enemies, the game seems to just have two types – those that randomly move around a limited area, and those that stand in place, there’s no real intelligence to enemy movements, no flanking maneuvers or attempts to gang up on the player. The same goes for enemy AI in battles – enemies randomly use attacks from their move list, with the target in your party seemingly chosen at random (with characters in the center of your lineup far more likely to be targeted than those on the flanks. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any intelligence or even an interesting pattern that enemies follow.

To be clear, all of these complaints are fairly minor annoyances, but they’re mostly annoyances that could have been fairly easily addressed, or else they’re modernizations that have become a standard with RPGs in recent decades that this game has opted not to include.

There is one other thing I should mention here, and that is the controls in this game. Legends of Amberland doesn’t seem like a game that was designed with a game controller in mind, but for a mouse. Menus are not laid out in a way conducive to using a controller, and players frequently won’t be selecting items from menus at all – rather, menu buttons are assigned to controller buttons and button combinations that players can view at any time by pressing ZR. While this does take some getting used to, I found that before long it felt like second-nature and worked well with the streamlined nature of the game’s combat. In fact, I got so used to this control scheme that when testing out the game in portable mode, I still found myself preferring the button combinations even though this game does use the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen to good effect. So I suppose you can mark that as a success.

When all is said and done, even with the many frustration that Legends of Amberland has, it is still a fun game that does a good job with the core gameplay loop of the Dungeon Crawler genre, and fans of the genre will very likely find this to be a solid entry into that genre. Exploration and combat are fast-paced and fun, and overall this game’s simple gameplay is ideal for short gaming sessions on the bus or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, making it a good fit for the Switch even if the controls clearly weren’t originally designed with the Switch in mind. However, while Legends of Amberland is fun, it’s not a game players are likely to remember with the same sort of fondness as the old-school games that clearly inspired it, and while the steps taken to modernize the old-school elements of the genre are great, there were numerous missed opportunities to do even more.

tl;dr – Legends of Amberland is a First-Person Dungeon Crawler that straddles the line between decidedly old-school gameplay and more modern improvements the genre has made, doing a great job of streamlining the genre’s core gameplay. However, there are definitely areas where more could have been done to improve on what’s here, and overall the game suffers from feeling extremely generic. Fans of the genre will likely enjoy this game, but may not have strong memories of it after they’ve finished it.

Grade: C+

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