A western Musou that avoids that series' flaws by being really greasy.
Even back when this game came out, Dark Legacy had middling reviews and looked just awful, one of the ugliest games across any of the various skews. I'd argue it actually looks worse than Legends just because of what you had to compare the game against. The music's a slightly (?) less compressed version of the Arcade/Legends tracks. Nothing in here is going to stand out as all-time great video game music, but the tracks that are included are varied and add to the atmosphere of each level. Nacho cheese fantasy tracks, which is preferable to boring.
This game gets a four because, as a co-op multiplayer game it's a great time. The RPG elements add to a sense of progression, but this isn't Diablo, or even Dark Alliance, you're not selecting a build and variations between characters aren't super meaningful. You find a power up on the ground, and bludgeon waves and waves of braindead mooks with them, and it's works. The enemy variety is relatively small, considering most are just reskins of "a guy way that walks forward, tries to bonk you on the head and dies in 1-3 hits", but the level design and visual variety makes it so that you don't really care. The amount of enemies on screen at once also contributes, the game can chug but it doesn't dip to anything unplayable and for larger waves the slowdown starts to approach shmup slowdown in the sense that it's kinda helpful to pause the action.
There's a lot of content in this game too. The game rewards exploration and experimentation, although the game's piss poor visuals can obscure what you're looking at sometimes. With four players, the game can last about three 2ish hour play sessions. Level-ups happen frequently, the game showers you in a healthy collection of powerups and gold to buy more powerups or stat increases, there are unlockable secret characters, there's a collectathon's variety of shit to look out for to advance to new levels. It's design is very obnoxious and loud, but in a way that successfully covers up the games weaknesses.
If you don't have friends to play this game with, skip it, there's not much here for you. If you got 1-3 other people who are looking for a couch game to play through, this an easy recommendation.
Even back when this game came out, Dark Legacy had middling reviews and looked just awful, one of the ugliest games across any of the various skews. I'd argue it actually looks worse than Legends just because of what you had to compare the game against. The music's a slightly (?) less compressed version of the Arcade/Legends tracks. Nothing in here is going to stand out as all-time great video game music, but the tracks that are included are varied and add to the atmosphere of each level. Nacho cheese fantasy tracks, which is preferable to boring.
This game gets a four because, as a co-op multiplayer game it's a great time. The RPG elements add to a sense of progression, but this isn't Diablo, or even Dark Alliance, you're not selecting a build and variations between characters aren't super meaningful. You find a power up on the ground, and bludgeon waves and waves of braindead mooks with them, and it's works. The enemy variety is relatively small, considering most are just reskins of "a guy way that walks forward, tries to bonk you on the head and dies in 1-3 hits", but the level design and visual variety makes it so that you don't really care. The amount of enemies on screen at once also contributes, the game can chug but it doesn't dip to anything unplayable and for larger waves the slowdown starts to approach shmup slowdown in the sense that it's kinda helpful to pause the action.
There's a lot of content in this game too. The game rewards exploration and experimentation, although the game's piss poor visuals can obscure what you're looking at sometimes. With four players, the game can last about three 2ish hour play sessions. Level-ups happen frequently, the game showers you in a healthy collection of powerups and gold to buy more powerups or stat increases, there are unlockable secret characters, there's a collectathon's variety of shit to look out for to advance to new levels. It's design is very obnoxious and loud, but in a way that successfully covers up the games weaknesses.
If you don't have friends to play this game with, skip it, there's not much here for you. If you got 1-3 other people who are looking for a couch game to play through, this an easy recommendation.