Legend: Hand of God Review
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As I mentioned in my review of Restricted Area "[the game] looks and sounds beautiful. The soundtrack perfectly captures the environment and adds excitement to the exploration and combat. Also, the combat and spell effects are well done, as are the character development and skill tree." Based on that my expectations for the technical side of the game were pretty high.
Fortunately the game delivers on all of the technical details, and does it without all of the problems Restricted Area had. The characters look realistic and well modeled, the environments are detailed and feature flowing and swaying grass and flowers and trees that rustle as you pass by. Perhaps the best thing is the animation of characters during battle. There was much discussion of the 'Cinematic Battle System' before release, and it lives up to the hype. Typically action-RPG's have a few static animations that are repeated thousands of times throughout the game. Legend: Hand of God take a page from the action game playbook and focuses on making the combat interesting to watch throughout. Enemies die with a seemingly fixed number of animations, but they are all better than the hyper-rag-doll flinging that happens in Space Siege. As in Restricted Area, the combat effects are very well done - when you hit or are hit with a critical the screen shudders; spell effects are wonderfully done; and when you manage a 'finishing move' (critical hit that kills an enemy) you are treated to a gruesome completion to the battle.
In terms of controls and camera the game doesn't stray from the standard click-click-click forumla for the genre - and in this game it works pretty well. The controls are intuitive and responsive, but the camera seems to have limits that are too small. You can't get close enough to the character to feel engaged with the action, nor can you get far enough away to have a truly strategic perspective. One complaint with the controls - the default controls had some keys 'overloaded'. For example, 'P' was both Pause and Screenshot, and 'A' rotates the camera to the left and also picks up all loot. I changed the first one after getting two screens of the same thing since I had to un-pause the game, and changed the second one after my annoyance level with hearing Targon complain about the full pack peaked.
