Reviews

Legacy for Palm OS

June 14, 2004

Developed by RedShift, Legacy is a fully-featured roleplaying adventure for a variety of handheld devices (including smartphones and Windows Mobile). This review covers version 1.05 for Palm OS, which requires 4.4MB of RAM and was played on a Tapwave Zodiac. My first thought when I loaded up this game was an immediate “Wow”— I’m a big fan of handhelds in general, but generally when it comes to gaming they’re just not able to pull off some of the more spectacular effects one usually sees when playing a PC or console game. But RedShift has worked some amazing magic, creating a fully-featured gameplay environment that almost makes you forget that you’re playing on a handheld device. This is especially true on the Tapwave Zodiac, since you can use the joystick and the shoulder buttons to control your characters. If you lay your keys out right, you might not have to use the stylus at all.

The game starts off with you as a lone adventurer, in the middle of the forest. You get a few clues that lead you to the town of Decrantes, and after exploring the town you’ll have several quests to fulfill, some gold, and perhaps a few items and potions. Visit the tavern to recruit some more members for your party, up to a maximum of four. It’s important to get the right mix of characters, with some fighters and at least one mage or cleric. Postioning the members of your party is also important, as only the two in the front can use melee weapons, while the two in the back can cast spells or use projectile weapons such as arrows. Thankfully that’s as hard as it gets- the turn-based combat works well and is deeply satisfying.

 

After that you’ll need to keep exploring, defeating the various enemies such as spiders, gnomes, Amazons, and the like. One important piece of advice is to explore absolutely everything, as you never know what you’re going to find. One of my most enjoyable moments was discovering that you really can gamble in the tavern, playing a card game reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering for a bet of 50 gold. Thankfully saving the game is quite easy, and you are provided several slots— some of those enemies are tough! The graphics are absolutely top-notch, and the user interface is very well designed. Controlling my inventory and checking the status of my characters all worked out as expected, and I also appreciate the ability to rename my character if I so desire. The latest update also adds the ability to “stack” items, meaning that if you have five healing potions and 3 fireball scrolls, they’ll only take up one inventory slot each, respectively. That’s very important when you’re gathering up lots of treasure as you defeat enemies in the dungeons and catacombs, but don’t necessarily want to keep going back and forth to town in order to sell things.

My only “gripes” are very small ones. The sound effects are great, I just want more of them. The quest log is nice, but should provide more detail, or perhaps the ability to see the text from when the quest was received. Sometimes I forgot a key detail and had to hunt down the appropriate character so I could talk to them again. I would also like to see a more fully fleshed out manual, or perhaps some more help offered to players of the game. I’m a very experienced gamer, but I found some of the puzzles and challenges to be frustratingly difficult. I was almost ready to throw up my hands, until I went to the Redshift web site and got a few pointers that made me eager to try my hand once again and solving some of those devilish puzzles. It could be worse though— I’d rather have something of a “head scratcher” than a game that was so easy and unpolished that there isn’t any challenge at all.

If you think you’re up to the challenge, give Legacy a try. A free trial is available, or you can purchase the full version for $19.95. Once you finish the original game, there are two expansion packs available. The official expansion pack is $9.99, and another pack entitled Legacy: Revenge is $5.99. Check it all out at the Redshift web site.

PocketGoddess Rating for Legacy:

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