Previous Next

The year is 2127 and Russia has been a colony of the US for over a century. The people are starving, Neuromancer influenced mega-corporations are running amok, genetically modified food is introducing the masses to cancer, non genetically modified animals have been extinct for ages, the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer and this time around there is no Lenin. There's only John Doe - strangely, one of the more interestingly named heroes in history - and it sure feels as if someone pressed the diarrhea button for the great arsehole up there. Oh, and thankfully it's still 2007 and this, apparently, is a review of Urban Legend.

So, uh, let me introduce the game properly, shall I? Well, according to the developer (Russia based ELENS) Urban Legend is an isometric turn-based squad-based strategy game, and, shockingly, it really is. And a good one at that too. The game offers over 30 levels of sheer strategic fun that will definitely appeal to the Fallout, Jagged Alliance and X-Com (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) crowds, providing a very elegant action points based combat mechanic and an intuitive interface, that's as simple as left-clicking to move and right-clicking to fire. Then again, moving and firing, admittedly with the added hassle of picking the right weapons and selecting/equipping a modestly sized squad, can be tactically challenging enough to test years of accumulated turn-based combat experience and even lead to frustration and/or insomnia. Thankfully genre beginners and tired middle-agers can always go for the easy setting.

Us young and lively gnomes, on the other hand, always go for the harder difficulty setting such as ...er... hard and nightmare... It's a masochist thing, really and a way to make us plan and think like in the old days before the RTS.

The enemy AI feels brilliant, and - what's more - getting progressively smarter, the level design is varied and lethal enough to have your clumsily positioned sniper killed in no time, whereas the simple RPG-like progression of your squad gives the game a depth that can easily turn it into an addictive marathon. I for one have spent over 30 hours with the beast and have yet to beat it or at least get bored. You see, Urban Legend might not be the most innovative indie game ever developed, but it's a brilliantly polished, immensely playable and very fair experience, that does make sure you'll only loose when you make an obvious - even if tiny - mistake. It's a fully satisfying example of an almost extinct, but still popular (ah, you gotta love them contradictions) genre.

The only rough bits are some awkward translations from Russian to English that are easily forgiven, as they almost enhance the (cyberpunk; did I mention that?) atmosphere. Besides, when you get tons of beautiful pixel-artist created graphics - some the best I've actually ever seen - and smart splashes of sarcastic humor, you can definitely ignore the odd misspelling. Oh, and make no mistake, the retro gaming lot will love it.

Hats off to Electronic Entertainments Studio for creating a new turn-based combat game for all us X-Com fanboys! Urban Legend is a highly polished game that's more than worthy of it's modest shareware price tag, and I wish I'd had more time to play it before writing this rushed second opinion, but unfortunately time isn't a luxury us magazine editors get much of (deadlines to meet and all that, don't you know).

The game is very slickly presented (ignoring the Runglish text of course) and the game is really intuitive to play; even RTC newbies will be massacring Bigfood Corp. employees in a matter of minutes. In fact, I'll be bold enough to say that it's perhaps a little too simple - the game unfortunately lacks the detail that hardcore RTC players have come to expect; you can't destroy or damage the environment with standard weapons (as you can in UFO), nor can you ransack dead bodies for their possessions (a personal hobby of mine, well, at the weekends anyway).

However, 30 missions of top quality AI-fuelled gritty urban guerrilla combat for just over a tenner is a great deal in anyone's book.