Battleheart Legacy Review

Battleheart Legacy is an exceedingly well designed action RPG, that for 4.99, provided 22 hours of swashbuckling fantasy adventure. 

Rarely do mobile games feel this complete. Many iOS games function as hamster wheels; hop on, spin around, and check back later to see how big your city, crops, empire, or clan of barbarians have grown. This sort of design isn’t always bad; games like Dead Ahead, Booking Revolution, and All Guns Blazing utilize this strategy in combination with fascinating gameplay to provide literally endless entertainment.

But like a buffet, these games will beat you before you beat them. You’ll grow bored, distracted, or move on before the game ends because the game can’t end.  You will gander at the icon and sigh wistfully for satisfaction that, by-design, is impossible to obtain.

So there’s something to be said for a mobile game that is a three course meal. and Battleheart Legacy is sort of classic in that regard. It has a beginning, middle, and end. Much like Metal Gear Solid or Gears of War or Max Payne 3 or Mass Effect 2, Battleheart Legacy won't feel you feeling peckish or overstuffed. 

Legacy's overarching story isn’t off the menu or anything, but the writing adds a post-modern pop by encouraging child-like chicanery. For example, about 8 hours in, I stumble upon a mage academy. The headmaster tasks me with securing ‘magic’ mushrooms so I can summon an evil spider-boss. The idea is if we defeat him via the power of arcane magic; his students will know that good-old fashion magery is *just* as cool as the dark arts of necromancy and witchcraft.

I secure the mushrooms after killing the dirty hippy that got there before me, and summon the spider in the presence of the mage and his students. After an exciting battle that felt like the best parts of World of Warcraft, I slay the spider in real-time via flame arrows, a sharp axe, and damage buffs. Hooray! I beat the quest! ...Right?

"You're SUPPOSED TO USE MAGIC!" exclaims the mage. Out of my reply options, I accuse him of being a mushroom-loving drug addict. His class laughs him into resigning from the academy. 

The students turn to me for direction, and not being a mage, I can offer them none.

Later, I follow these students to a secret hangout where they learn ‘dark arts’, obtain a possessed skull, and black out. When I wake up, everyone at the mage academy is dead by my hand. The skull transforms into a humanoid necromancer and challenges me to kill him...if I don't want to learn from him. I wasn't powerful enough to kill him, so...I learned how to resurrect the dead. Spooky.

Battleheart Legacy strikes just the right note, tone wise. It isn’t so much satire or parody as it is self-aware, it favors humor over melodrama, and it’s designed with the understanding brevity is the soul of wit; You create and customize a character, distribute some stats, and head out on an adventure. You’re presented a world map, points of interest, some quests, and simply have at it. 

And how it will have you! I mentioned WoW, but picture any ‘home-row’ MMORPG and you’ll get the picture - assign your skills and spells and buffs to a bar, target enemies, manage your health, target, attack, retreat, loot, smile giddily. Occasionally you'll gain a companion or pet,  each dungeon and battle is streamlined, boiling Battleheart Legacy into a ‘healthy choice’ portion of RPG battle goodness - perfect for the mobile platform. Unless you’re in the arena trying to break a record, rarely does a dungeon crawl extend beyond 15 minutes. 

How you get these wonderful spells and gizmos and skills actually feels quite a bit like another major RPG series - The Elder Scrolls. You’re not shoehorned into a given class, and the combinations are boundless. You can master the elements and burn, freeze, and shock enemies. Poison the masses. Be a brawling Barbarian. A sneaky Witch. A Paladin with a pet puppy. A Rogue that can charm the pants off enemies to do your bidding. Boost your charisma to talk your way out of battles.

But unlike Elder Scrolls, the combat is action-packed and enthralling and tough; rewarding strategy over skill points. This means different things depending on your play style - for Rangers it means timing multi-shot arrows with ‘enrage’ buffs, for necromancers that means poisoning the strongest foe and letting them contaminate their comrades, for Wizards it means casting as many spells as possible while teleporting all over the map, and so on.  

Regardless of how you want to play, you’ll *want* to play.

Battleheart Legacy is so expertly paced, so confident in its gameplay and writing, that it appears effortless. Like any great RPG, the narrative, gameplay, and progression gel wonderfully - but if you ask me what makes the game special is that it's not overstuffed.  Major console games that strive to shove 27 different mini-games and activities into their 'open world experiences'  that are 'pretty good', Battleheart does four or five (depending on how you count) things exquisitely - as a famous sailor once said: it is what it is, and that's all that it is.  

Save for a final boss with an instant-death spell, and the fact I missed out on a quest chain because I killed a bandit I should have worked with, my biggest gripe with Battleheart Legacy is that there’s no word of a sequel or DLC. Funny how the things we wish would end never do, and the things we wish won’t, forever will.