[quote][b]Warning: Incomplete Game[/b] This game has been released in an abandoned and incomplete state and cannot be completely finished or played properly.[/quote]
Legends is an ancient game from 1996. It's a whopping 28 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.
This game is so old it runs in DOSBOX and doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration. It has a dated control scheme, dated graphics, and runs poorly due to the DOSBOX emulation. While DOSBOX is a fine tool for those seeking retro gaming, it's not really appropriate for ancient abandonware like this to be dumped on Steam without any modernisation, this is just a greedy cash grab from developers trying to get your money for dead software, they want to pay them a second time for a game you probably already owned.
This is another abandonware cash grab by the gravediggers at Piko Interactive, who swindle their hands onto old abandoned/broken/dead games then try to swindle Steam gamers into paying them for someone else's old abandoned game. This is a particularly typical entry for Piko, as the game is an unfinished port of a Commodore Amiga game... leaving us to question how Piko got their hands on something that was never released, and why they thought it would be remotely ethical or acceptable for them to dump abandoned, incomplete garbage on Steam like this. As a gamer, I feel obliged to warn my fellow gamers about such behaviours and the resulting products... like this game.
For the parts of the game you can play, it's a clunky and obtuse top down shooter/adventure game hybrid with a bizarre theme about time travelers altering time by giving advanced weapons to ancient cultures... which might work plotwise but the game implementation itself is a complete train wreck, even for 1996.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Legends is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $9 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $9 asking price for this game could get you games like "Battlefield V", "Ark: Survival Evolved" or "Don't Starve Together". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
