Legio Review (PC, GamersGate)

Legio, I thought was going to be a far more involved game. But really it’s just a turn-based chess-like title. You choose your troops, choose the battlefield and have at it. The game’s copy states that it’s "an intense experience, requiring careful strategic thinking, rewarding both courage and cleverness!" I don’t know if it’s all that. It’s certainly not intense in any way.

Each match is two rounds, on the drawbridge and in the castle of the loser of the first match. In the first round you must choose your warriors from the available types and numbers. In the second round you are given points to bolster (or replace) your army. If you won the first round you keep your surviving warriors.

As with all strategy games there are lots of stats that you need to look at when determining your troops and overall strategy. Including strength, defense, movement range and attack range. Often this is more important that you placement of the troops as you’ve generally got a fairly limited area for them.

One thing I didn’t like is that archers can only shoot in a straight line-of-sight. So if you have troops blocking the way, they can’t shoot over them. That’s sort of silly as it’s easy enough, and was standard practice, to shoot arrows over the heads of your troops into oncoming soldiers prior to melee being taken up in the battle.

Your troops can either move, defend or move and attack. Why they can’t move and defend is beyond me. Archers are extremely weak in both defense and attack and are all but useless if there is a mage on the other team who can attack anyone on the board, line-of-sight or not.

The castles themselves are quite finely detailed but the rest of the game looks somewhat less-so. The character models for the two monarchs are blocky and mottled as if they tried to hide the flaws in them with busy textures but then only succeeded in making it all worse. The unit models are much of the same.