Story is intriguing in the beginning, dulls after a while. Puzzles are kind of annoying in this game. Loot does not reflect on your characters looks, and loot is basically just stat upgrades.

HOWEVER, Gameplay is SOLID. Very fun. Very tactical. Has a tactical pause system and making a wrong decision in battle wether that be your positioning or focusing the wrong guy first or missing an ability timing... can kill you. The cons mentioned up above are annoying yeah, but overall in a game like this , the gameplay is the most important part to me. I bought it at full price and was pleased with my experience. If you're not sure, wait for a sale and then DEFINITELY pick it up.

Each character has 4 main abilities. As you level up characters in the game, you can allocate stat points into these abilities. Each ability has a tree that branches out into different paths. You can basically max two of any of the eight branches on each character, thus customizing their playstyle. You can have a mage healer, or they can be a damage dealer or a mix. You can implant a seed that will explode if you kill the enemy within x number of seconds, and the explosion can do a heal AOE to teammates caught within range of said explosion, or you can max a completely different ability.

There end up being eight playable characters, and you make a party of four. You choose the four. Seriously, the gameplay styles are really left in your hands with how you want to play the game. Very wise on the devs part. These are the reasons the gameplay is so satisfying. When all the abilities in your party go off just right and you completely wreck a mob... it feels pretty good.

Great game. I give it 8/10.

Pros:

-Puzzles to unlock goodies on about every level
-Awesome puzzles to complete storyline
-Good storyline
-Combat is intriguing and makes you think--must be very strategic.
-The number of companions that you can control and deck out with gear
-Pausing the game to plan out strategies
-Talent trees to cutomize for each companion; it adds a deeper level of gameplay
-Decent graphics

Cons:

-Game has some bugs--sometimes the abilities for a companion will not show up. Or, when you click on a companion, another companion's abilities show up. When this happens, you have to restart the game to fix.
...So, because of this, you need to remember to save the game after every battle!!
-Gear is simplistic--it doesn't seem to have gear specific to any one character, it doesnt change the look of your character, and it does not change or add abilities to any character. Basically. gear just adds passive stats.
-No end game. When you beat it, that's it. No unlocking of ubber mode, or anything, to find better gear for your characters. So, you can't really do anything else with the characters you have leveled up and decked out...not even restart and play the game again with your decked out characters.

Pro or Con?

-Easy to cheat to get gear. Just stand in front of a treasure box before you open it and save. If you don't like what you get, just load that save point and try again. You can do this when creating loot, too.
-Right before you beat the game, the storyline takes a drastic turn and ends, leaving you hanging.

What I would like to see in DLC or part 2 if they choose to make it, which devs should:

-Instead of still pausing, make it to where everything is in slowmo when you hit what is now the pause key.
-better gear
-some end game
-more challenges and hidden treasure
-more bosses

Tips if you decide to buy:

-Save Frequently
-Wendaroo is freaking awesome, so learn how to use her.
-Save before opening chests so you can reload last save if you don't like what you get.
-When creating loot, the last item is the item you will create.. it could've been my imagination, though, but it usually also had the last attribute of that item put into it too.
-Go for one target at first--usually the squishy magic type, like priests or mages. If you can't demolish it in 5 seconds, split your damage amongst other targets.
..usually I tried demolishing one fast. But when that didn't work, I usually split dmg across two targets in two seperate areas until one or the other was very low hp and then switched to full focus dmg on that one. This also helped me metigate inc damage better because I could see everything that was going on better so I knew who to heal and dispel and such.

One of the best games I have played in a long time. Challenging, engaging, beautiful and a little retro. And the best part.. cheap.

Aarklash isn't very deep in terms of RPG elements (though they are there, in a skill tree/limited inventory kind of way) but it is extremely deep in terms of gameplay. This is the first game in a long time where I relished the rematch after I was utterly destroyed. Battles take place in real time, but you can pause at any time to chain orders. You can also remap your skill tree before a battle at no cost, so if at first you don't obiliterate - recalibrate, recalibrate again.

The downside, and the reason I stopped playing in the end game, are the puzzles. At first the game reminded me of "The Summoning" where battles were intermixed with puzzles. But in the second act I was starting to get annoyed, and by the third act I had had enough. It just grinds the pace down to fight, puzzle, puzzle, fight, puzzle. And the puzzles aren't even interesting! They are rehashes of the earlier ones, with stupid terms and well...

The upside is the fist half of the game, the pacing is spot-on, the graphics are sweet and like i said, the battles are the kind of thing that you walk away from a loss intrigued and not frustrated. You can constantly employ different teams and different skill sets, which leads to a depth not really seen in many games. I just wish they had spent more time developing the puzzles, instead of copy-pasting them at greater frequency.

All scores out of 10, with 7 the highest:

Graphics: 7
Sound: 7
Depth: 7
Retro: 7
Puzzles: 1
End game: 4
RPG: 5
Strategy: 7

Aarklash: Legacy is a squad based strategy game developed by Cyanide, releasing in September 2013 as a PC exclusive.

Game play focuses primarily on a group of four characters, each of the characters have their own designated role within a group, such as tanking, healing and damage dealing. You will unlock more characters by progressing through the story mode however you can only have four characters in your group at any one time, meaning squad management plays a key role in success. Whilst each of the characters have their own primary role, there is some overlap with a few abilities, such as damage dealers may also have a healing spell to help out if needed, and healers will also have damage dealing spells. All characters have an “auto attack” which means your healers are still important when it comes down to burning enemies quickly.

Whilst the gameplay is mostly played in real time, the pause mechanic allows you to break from the mayhem in the fight to plan out your next wave of attacks and precisely move your group members around the battlefield. Whilst this is a nice addition, I didn’t find that much use for it, as I was able to do a lot of my commands in real time. What I did like however was how the game automatically pauses for you the moment you enter a battle, meaning you can get your initial abilities queued up to take a big advantage over your foes. Looting in Aarklash is pretty neat too; there are only four item slots per character, necklace, rings, pendants and trinkets. Most enemies will drop loot, as well as finding it in treasure chests across the world too. Any loot which you have no use for, you can disenchant to create an epic quality item; this was a really nice way of dealing with unwanted or old equipment rather than just selling it to a vendor. It helped keep inventory space clear and your characters always had access to better equipment even if you weren’t lucky on the loot drops.

The talent system through levelling up the characters is quite in-depth. Each character has four abilities as well as their auto attack. You are able to enhance the four abilities through a talent tree, which manipulates how the ability works, adding an additional effect, or just straight up increasing the amount of damage, healing or stats the abilities does. As with other talent systems in games, this allows you to mould your characters exactly how you want to fit in with the rest of your groups’ dynamics, allowing for some interesting hybrid characters to be built.

One of my biggest negatives with Aarklash is the lack of any real checkpoint system. The game does offer unlimited quick saves, but if you are like me, you will often forget to save after large portions of game play and when you die, well…you are smack bang at the start of the level again, leaving you deflated and disillusioned at the thought of having to replay the past half an hours’ worth of battles. Yes this issue can easily be fixed by the player and remembering to save, but there are enough cut scenes in the game that could easily act as a saving point for the level which would solve the games biggest flaw.

Graphically, Aarklash is gorgeous. This game could quite easily pass as a recently released title due to the high graphical fidelity on show. All the main character models are all extremely high quality, and enemy models are slightly lower in quality but still look decent enough given the rest of the games high quality textures. The game’s UI is OK to navigate, however a scaling of the UI also gets effected dramatically with the resolution you are playing in, meaning I was playing in 4K, so my UI was extremely small and I had to resort to getting uncomfortably close to my screen to even be able to read the text.

I played Aarklash on the medium difficulty, and was happy with the challenges presented to me. A lot of people have commented on the community forums that they are finding even easy mode hard, but I feel as long as you take your time to build your characters properly, and equip them with the correct loot, then you shouldn’t have any problems, and even if you still do run into issues then you can just make full use of the in game pause mechanic to plan out your every attack since well…that’s what the feature is there for. Upon completing the game, you will unlock the Rag’Narok difficulty level which you can probably guess, ramps up the difficulty to deathly levels and only should be taken on by hard core players.

Each of the game’s chapters is split into a handful of smaller levels; some of the levels will merely be a case of working your way around the map and killing any of the foes you come across in order to find the exit. Others will include some quite interesting puzzles for you to master. None of the puzzles are mindboggling difficult to figure out, some require a little bit of thought, whilst others rely on your reaction times by moving characters across the map avoiding obstacles. I thought the addition of the puzzles broke up the fighting sections of the game quite nicely and gave you a chance to experience something different.

I finished Aarklash: Legacy in just under 7 hours. I do feel there is a good portion of replay ability on offer though; given the fact you can either ramp up the difficulty for a second play through, or even just using different characters throughout the story mode to give you a different game play experience.

Apart from the UI scaling issue when it comes to higher resolutions, the other technical problem I encountered was very long loading times; almost to the point of me thinking the game had crashed. I was playing the game being installed on a regular HDD rather than an SSD but I have no loading problems on much more demanding games on a regular HDD, so there is clearly an optimization problem here. Thankfully there aren’t too many loading screens to deal with so this issue can be easily overlooked.

Aarklash: Legacy was a sparkling gem in the rough for me. I didn’t expect much going into it, but was pleasantly surprised with the quality of game play and impressive graphics on show. It felt very much like a top down version of World of Warcraft with the different class roles, talent system and looting mechanics on offer. The medium length campaign mode could be classed as being on the short side, but given the high production values on show, I would highly recommend people not take that into too much consideration. The price of £14,99 may be a little on the steep side for people on the fence about this game, but I would definitely recommend tactical minded people to pick up Aarklash: Legacy.

Tom's Score Card
1) Stay away
2) Not Recommended
3) Only recommended when on sale
4) Recommended
5) Highly recommended
6) This is a must play

If you found this review helpful, please give it a thumbs up. If you would also like to follow my reviews more easily, be sure to join my group by clicking here.

You may also be interested in checking out a PC gaming podcast, be sure to head here.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/222640/

Aarklash Legacy is a highly tactical RPG set in the world of Aarklash and based on the desktop miniature game Confrontation. While not a direct sequel by any means, it is set in the same world as the handily named Confrontation, a far inferior game, also from Cyanide Studios.

You play as a group of Wheelswords, the debt collectors of the Gold Mongers guild, the group that funds the armies of the ever warring races in Aarklash. Your initial 4 person group is quite the motley lot, a part mechanical lizard with self confidence issues, a dog-monster, a tiny rat-like man and the standard fantasy trope of a sorceress in skin tight revealing clothing. While the player doesn't have a customisable avatar of their own, it becomes clearer as the story goes that one of the starting four serves as the POV character. Over the course of the game you'll meet 4 more characters that can be swapped in at any time for a maximum of 4 in the party. All the characters are interesting and frequently talk among themselves and the game itself is fully voice acted very well.

Where the game really shines is the isometric real-time with pause combat. The standard MMO trinity applies here, with a tank to hold and collect as many mobs up as possible and hopefully orient them away from the squishier party members and 3 support or damage dealers. Each character is limited to only four abilities and an auto-attack. While this might seem limiting at first all the abilities can be significantly changed as you level up and with the ability to respec at will you can tailor your group to each individual fight. Positioning is vitally important here, many of your parties abilities are line of sight. There is nothing more annoying than firing off a healing disk and having an enemy walk in between and get healed instead!

All enemies and bosses have there own set of abilities that can be viewed at any time and you should ignore these at your peril. Enemies come in many types, tanks who self-heal and can resurrect themselves, healers, debuffers, melee, ranges, summoners and many more. While bosses come with own set of difficulties, many have insta-kill abilities like stay too close and you die, stay too far away and you die or don't stand here and you die. You'll die a lot but all these abilities are telegraphed well! Buffing and debuffing also plays a vital role in the game. A favourite trick of enemy casters is to immediately turn off your group members most vital abilities but luckily some of your other characters are able to strip debuffs off one member and apply them to themselves. Enemies will also constantly control your characters and many fights do degenerate into battling a series of buffs and debuffs with the first few seconds of any fight being the most important. Though one criticism might be once you break the back of an enemy group, it can become a bit of a grind to finish a group off with no real threat.

As opposed to the combat this is not a gear heavy game though, each character only has 4 slots, relic, ring, necklace and earring and you can't change armor or weapons or make any visual change to the characters. There are also no merchants in the game, just a recycling mechanic where once you put in enough items in you'll get a high quality item back.

The game also contains a heavy puzzle element outside of the combat. From the standard lights out puzzles, though on a grand scale, to match the floaty magic symbol with various parts made up from lever pulls to guide the light through a maze. At times the number of puzzles in a row can overwhelm, you can bypass some of them, but you might miss out on some of the best loot!

This game is very demanding of the player, asking of exact positioning, use of all your various abilities and strategies and punishing of mistakes. The difficulty is also set very high, it's not easy, medium, hard, it's more on the Super Hexagon Scale, hard, harder and harderest! Though I think the latest patch may have toned the difficulty down a little bit. But, don't let that scare you off as you'll miss one of the best tactical RPGs in years!

9.5/10

Aarklash: Legacy is a RTWP (Real time with pause) game. While it does not have the story that a Baldur's Gate (or Pillars of Eternity) has, it shines in its
- Characters: distinct abilities, well-defined characters
- Graphics: Nicely drawn
- Tactical gameplay: In the best traditions of Icewind Dale. The fights require thought, and synergy in abilities in your characters, where the next point is important.......
- Strategic gameplay: Redo your choices in the skill tree anytime, choose among the available characters
- Polish: Free from bugs
- Difficulty Levels: The game is best appreciated on the harder difficulty levels, making you improve your strategies, and sometimes play through multiple times. However, there are four levels of difficulty, including on the fly changes that are particularly useful to get you through a hard fight.
- Pricing: Far less than a Pillars of Eternity, particularly when its on sale

Cons:
- Story is trivial, focus is on the fights
- Voice acting is a bore

Summary:
This game really should have done better than it has.

Tactical party-based rpg with heavy focus on combat

Good points:
Nice story
Interesting Characters
Challanging tactical combats
Well balanced combat system
Cheap
Riddles lighten the gameplay up from time to time

Bad Points:
Very straight forward with little space to explore and no alternative solutions
Short
Little point in replaying, else than doing the ragnarok achievments
Disappointing end
Riddles are too easy
No influence on character devlopment (in terms of roleplay, not in terms of skills! you have all freedom there)

Conclusion:
I would recommend the game to everyone who misses Baldurs Gate /Icewind Dale or challanging combat rpgs in general.
Do not assume it to have the character or story depths of said games though, or you will be disappointed!

There are games that good, that you know them by names or even played them, and probably even enjoyed them even if they were released before you were born. There are other games, that were really cool - but only due to the time they were released, and probably some time after. And also, there are some games, that took some major gameplay ideas from the other games, those that were popular before, with the aim to make it all even better. Buff it. However, sadly enough, those games of this third kind, are usually quite short-lived. Also, more often than not, they do not have even a small share of the popularity that was with those earlier games, the gameplay of which they strive to bring to the ideal.

Aarklash: Legacy, released in 2013, pretty much copies most of the gameplay ideas from the games from the early '00s. And if you have played such games then, in the '00s, you'll get along with Aarklash without serious trouble. However, for the new players who started in the '10s or so... It'll probably feel pretty much dated and boring. Well, some people say that Aarklash heroes are looking very much like heroes from DOTA or League of Legends - but in the solo game. Some spiral in the action, because before DOTA, we had Warcraft 3 and Spellforce - solo games, where the most part of the action was revolving not around strategy, with building units, swarming them to masses, and all that delightful mess that many RTS players admire the most... No, it was about some main figures, the heroes, each with some set of unique skills and even some 'RPG-like' evolution, with growing levels, spending some skill points, and equipping some items to power up the stats.

Oh, well, I'm sorry for that long-winded intro. Just want to state the main idea: Aarklash: Legacy feels quite dated, old-fashioned, and probably quite boring and unsettling for most players today, in 2021. But, as the general games admirer, I can say that by some points, it is really quite buffed up, and surprisingly deep, in terms of that classic gameplay from the early '00s. With the bunch of strong fighters, forming a circle, and, by the wise combination of various powers, overwhelming even the strongest opponents.

Action gameplay, with that circle of fighters, acting in real-time with pause - like in Dragon Age Origins, in a way - is the whole game, actually. Sure, there is some story attached, some drama even, and you can't say that you'll be only fighting some enemies, wave after wave, on some rigid rails leading to the final boss battle. No. There's also some map exploring, and... some puzzles. Like several dozens of them, on your way. Some you will solve without even trying hard enough, just by moving one of your characters fast enough through some obstacles. Some will require from you an understanding of the underlying algorithm before you proceed. And some of the puzzles will combine everything: there'll be some fast-moving obstacles, and you'll need to use several (or all four) of your active characters to move in a sequence, to unlock another gate on your way...

But. Once again, the main part of the gameplay still about fighting, in a team of four characters. A bit later on in the story events, you'll collect some additional characters, and even be able to tune your 4-edged star of fighters, moving different characters with very different powers to different positions in the battle formation. Of course, some characters by default are better on the rear, supportive seats, while others will be the most useful upfront. But the main idea of that 4-edged star, is actually a supreme one, for close combat, if we're not talking about armies and battle formations of tens, hundreds, and thousands of men. I know it because I was trained to play some real-world war games in such a 4-edged star, and I remember those fascinating for the opponents moments when that star formation was actually showing its best, rotating, covering each other, attacking from the unexpected positions... I am not That nostalgic to value Every video game higher than it deserves only because it uses that formation. It's just that feeling, that it was made right in this game.

While the story there, in general, isn't all that nice to write home about it... There are several interesting moments in it. One is obvious from the start - it was supposed to be catchy - your protagonists are actually quite odd-looking characters. Freaks, even. And those freaks are fighting some classic human paladins in the game's beginning, so it might look like we're fighting for the bad guys, initially. However, a bit later on, when all the figures on the exposition are made their moves and showed their colours, and it's all getting flat, 'here's the villain, beat him to save the world'-pattern, comes another strong chord, which actually stays powerful enough up to the end of the game: the battle fraternity is a really cool thing. So, in the end, your team of freaks and unlikely heroes is actually growing some empathy. Soul of the corps, they call it.

To sum it up, Aarklash: Legacy is actually quite a mediocre action game about a team of mercenaries in dire circumstances, a long-worn trope, obviously. And the gameplay from the '00s can't actually sweeten the taste. It is not bad, by any means, it's just... not sufficient, for the major part of the audience. Therefore, my mark would be 6.5/10. But I really like this game as it is. I feel like I understand the passion of its creators, and I can say they did a good job. It's just... one of those games from the third category. Easily overlooked ones, and not quite worthy to be called 'hidden gems'.

This is definitely one of those diamonds in the rough kind of games. The strategic gameplay is amazing. Timing, targeting, and positioning is very important.

First the bad. There are definitely some aspects of this game that I wouldn't recommend. The storyline is decent, kinda your very overdone basic story though. Voice acting doesn't always match the dialoge text. The gear you get in the game is just RNG crap. 95% of the time you will get items that do not have the specific stats you want.

The good. Graphics are well done. The pause/assign gameplay is like Dragon Age, except the fact it is done wonderfully and is pretty much required to do well. The skills and skill tree are very unique, making each character add an interesting element to the game. You must read and understand your enemies to know which to target, and which you can counter.

Excellent game. Maybe not a box office hit, but it is unique and inspiring. Makes you wish there was a sequel, or another game more like it.

I highly recommend this!

From start to finish the combat is very engaging and has a great level of difficulty in terms of challenge and balancing from normal to hard difficulties.
There is a good range of different combinations with party members and talent trees so don't get too distracted by the equipment load out which is not as extensive as other RPG's, this game is honestly just very solid gameplay wise.
The visuals are lovely, there is a decent single player story to go through and then throw in a bunch of hidden areas with some puzzle sections and you may experience one of the more satisfying games in a while!

I also recommend checking out a YouTube channel by Force Strategy Gaming for a nice overview of the game in action.