LifeisXbox’s Legend of Keepers review | What’s that? It looks like we have a new dungeon master here, welcome to the business of either making adventurers cry or die, either way, we’ll get the resources we need. Of course, there’s more to it than that, like dealing with a dead pet maggot from an employee, training yourself and your troops, and other things, but the most fun part will always be dealing with the puny humans. The developers from Goblinz Studio are the ones who created these dungeons, while Klabater is responsible for publishing the console version of them.
ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox One | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion of the writer.
What we Liked!
- Not the most nor the least complex | The gameplay of Legend of Keepers consists of not only managing resources and troops but also preparation and action phases for dungeons. I know some games are way more complex in both strategy and management, and I’m glad Goblinz Studio decided to not make it more complex than this because it’d most likely make the game significantly less enjoyable.
- Management | The management part consists of many different things, including random events with plenty of different outcomes and rewards, buying new troops and traps, training your troops and yourself, upgrading traps, managing what troops to bring with you, (they can get exhausted if you’re not careful, and that means they’ll be unavailable for 10 weeks), sending troops to get you rewards in exchange of them being unavailable for a specified time, among other non-randomized events. You’ll have to choose what you’ll want to do in a week, as shown in the last image of this review, so analyze what resources you have before clicking on any of them, as you won’t be able to go back. The warning sign you can also see in that same image warns you that you can’t afford anything from there.
- Combat | In the combat phase, you must choose a skill to utilise, but you should pause and consider your options first because each attack targets a particular enemy based on their position, even though some skills target all enemies. Enemies and allies can use skills that can buff or debuff both teams, so also keep an eye on those. You can utilise spells and special traps against the adventurers in some dungeon rooms. You can weaken your foes’ morale, and if their morale bar reaches zero, they will flee the battle, which is another aspect of fighting to take into account that I don’t think is frequently tackled in video games. If the adventurers make it to the last room, you’ll be able to use your selected master (boss), against them in combat. You can speed up the combat actions by up to 3x if you want to. If you kill adventurers you’ll get blood, if you scare them off you’ll get tears, and these resources can be used on various events in the management part of the game, so I’d recommend you try to get both as frequently as you can.
- A welcome sense of humour | If you feel like all of the gameplay mechanics combined will be stressful, there’s a sense of humour present in Legend of Keepers that will ensure you at least crack a little smile. Be it the corporate-like talk that can be seen in the image below that’s occasionally recurring throughout the game, the way they speak about humans or even events such as making someone cry, having three “fantasy options” that all result in someone being killed in an event, or even deciding if you want to make a burial or sell a dead pet from an employee, don’t worry, their pets, at least from what I’ve seen, are all from the maggot family.
- Accessible | Legend of Keepers allows you to adjust the game’s difficulty rather adequately, despite only allowing you to select the volume, the language you want to play in, and two gameplay-related choices in the options menu. You can control the strength of the heroes, how much gold you receive, how much health your master has, how much motivation adventurers lose, and how long you want the game to last in addition to the standard difficulty options that automatically determine the individual settings. Although it seems strange because you also get to choose how much gold you receive, the difficulty options you select will affect how much gold you receive.
- Graphics | Although the graphics in Legend of Keepers aren’t the most original you’ve ever seen, they are nevertheless attractive. You’ll primarily notice the pixelated graphics, which do contain some well-detailed settings and people. This gives the game a distinctive vibe that wouldn’t be the same if the graphics were other. The master portraits are the only parts that don’t employ pixelated images; you can barely see them in the final image of this article because they’re in the lower left corner, but they still look great.
- Extra content available | If you like playing Legend of Keepers, you should be aware that two masters are available for purchase as DLC; these DLCs also include additional quests, spells, monsters, traps, artefacts, and even new gameplay mechanics. These DLCs are not covered in this review, but I thought it was important to at least acknowledge their existence.
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Mixed Feelings
- Soundtrack | The voice acting in Legend of Keepers is fairly decent; it doesn’t feel forced and enhances the humour when necessary while also improving the feel of the combat. Additionally, the sound effects are rather good and give the game more substance. The main reason I included the soundtrack in this segment is that, while the background music does fit the game and isn’t horrible, it doesn’t feel particularly exceptional; rather, it feels like background music to keep the game from feeling empty.
What we Disliked
- That feels tiresome | The only bad thing I can point out about Legend of Dungeons is that I personally felt like runs take a bit too long to finish, I wish there was a way to play shorter runs instead of a 1-2h long run every time I wanted to play the game. Why’s that? Because although it’s a good game, there’s a lot to think of in every aspect, even though it could be even more complicated, it still feels overwhelming at times.
How long to beat the story | 25h – 30h
How long to achieve 1000G | 60h+
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Hi there, I’m Gabriel Colombo (Hence my reviewer name), I live in Brazil and I’ve been gaming since I was around 5 years old. Xbox became my main platform on the Xbox 360 era, before that I had played a bit on PC, Polystation (basically a skinned SNES), PlayStation 1 and 2. I really enjoy to experience immersive worlds, but I also enjoy playing silly games to have a laugh or just have fun.
