Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is a game that had largely slipped under my radar. Stardock released the original game in 2012, and Legendary Heroes is a standalone expansion to that. Coming off of a rabid bout of XCOM and my third playthrough of Advance Wars, Legendary Heroes is a welcome dip into a far more complicated style of turn-based strategy.
The amount of options Legendary Heroes provides in the early game is daunting to say the least. Even with the tutorial, the game is complicated and multi-faceted. Without it I spent twenty minutes roaming around the map trying to find out how to make towns. The core of the game plays out in scenarios that place your chosen warlord against a number of others in a fully-adjustable fantasy landscape. There are hints of Civilization in the economy and exploration of the game, though Legendary Heroes does a bit more than that. At the core of your better units are the aforementioned heroes, who go on epic fantasy quests and generally adventure around with a party of whatever troops you happen to be making. The landscape is full of all kinds of miscellaneous friends, foes, and loot to be found; I wound up having several large scale battle before even meeting another civilization.
Those battles, like the rest of the game, take place in individual turns on grids. each unit acts on its own, and the game will pause briefly while AI opponents make their moves. Starting out the game isn’t always clear on why units get to move when and where they do; all of that data is part of a detailed set of statistics, but it can be easy for the information to feel buried if you’re not coming into Legendary Heroes with a lot of background.
While it’s not breaking machines in the same way something like Metro: Last Light is, Legendary Heroes does look pretty nice. Characters animate decently on their moves, and the antics of various units make the game feel something like a cross between an overblown Dungeons and Dragons campaign and that weird hologram chess game from Star Wars: Episode IV. The music is appropriately epic and creatures sound nice, but to be honest I spent much of my time with the game playing without the sound. It’s nice to be able to take turns in a game while doing/watching/listening to something else, and Legendary Heroes is conducive to this.
I should show you some of my streaming nonsense in the game, but this guy is probably going to give you a fuller experience of what’s going on in it. Take a look:
“Recommend” feels like too strong a word for Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. I enjoyed my time with it, and I’m sure other fans of the genre will do the same. But the depth of the game isn’t going to attract many newcomers, and nothing about the mechanics is going to sell someone on the genre. Sure, leveling up champions and gearing them up through conquests is neat, and the quest system offers some real value to exploring the world, but at its core this is a high fantasy twist on a fairly known quantity. Legendary Heroes is great for what it is, just don’t expect it to be the thing that makes this sort of game approachable for the first time.
