It’s hard to talk about this game. I wasn’t expecting much more than a Legends of Grimrock clone. I wasn’t looking for it to be perfect, just a good little experience. What I got was worse by a mile.
I’m going to save you all time by stating this straight out. Legend of Candlewind outright sucks. This game is a technical failure, falling over the most basic of technical issues. Friends who are on game design courses who wondered if I was kidding have taken all their word back. If science required an objective marker for sucking this would be at the top of the list. Go use the time I have just saved you to hold your loved ones and tell them you love them; count your blessings that you haven’t wasted precious time in your life playing this game or reading a review on how awful this game is.
For those of you who are still with us I feel I must explain my abject dislike for this game. Legend of Candlewind is a turned based RPG much in the same vein of Legends of Grimrock. You play as a hearty band of adventurers who have arrived at the town of Candlewind. The town is unfortunately besieged by rogue bandits from the nearby forest and the town is offering a reward for the head of the bandit leader. So your adventurers head off into the bandit settlement to stake a claim on this reward.
Here, you customise your party. Oh wait! Nope. That doesn’t happen. You have no control over your party. Their names, faces, skills and class are all pre-determined. You have two warriors, a mage and an archer and if you don’t like it, nobody will care. The party is placed within the dungeon and you must travel around looking for the bandits and generally kicking arse.
That’s it. That’s all seven quid gets you nowadays.
I am struggling to find anything redeemable with this game and anything redeemable in this game seems to come with a negative backhand. The opening music is nice despite it being heard only here and nowhere else. Everything is designed to look hand drawn yet the only two colours on the palate were apparently green and brown. The redeeming feature is the resource management. There is no popping back into town for potions and coming back for a grind to power level and enemies do not drop items. You have to carefully manage items you find in chests and from random encounters in the game otherwise you will be killed quickly. This does create a technical element to the game as you cannot simply hack through.
Now take a deep breath now because this is the bad side; and it is a lot longer than the good.
The story is horrendously presented and delivered lazily through textboxes; and also appears to have been translated from another language somewhat poorly. There is, as stated earlier, no character creation which considering the character progression system is wholeheartedly horrid is somewhat the best thing for your creations. Any degree of interface in the game is clunky or simply doesn’t work. According to online sources you need to perform five specific mouse clicks to fire an arrow. So to date I haven’t fired an arrow in the game. Then there are just huge oversights, like having a turn-based games with real-time torches and the inability to connect sections smoothly; you just shift between them like you take long, huge steps.
So I sat there watching this abomination continue to plague my screen and had a moment of self-doubt. Is this game actually as bad as I think it is? Do I just dislike it due to the fact I’m not a huge dungeon crawler fan? A quick dive on to the Steam store page confirmed that it was most definitely not just me who disliked this game. Out of 20 reviews all 20 of them were negative reviews. None of them showed any serious praise for the game. With this behind me I feel that it is near a certainty that this game is simply awful.
Unsurprisingly this game gets a zero, zilch, zip or the lowest we have which is, 0.5. This is an embarrassment of a game for £6.99. If you want a good dungeon crawler go for Legend of Grimrock. Sadly this game is attached to my Steam account as a permanent mark of embarrassment. This is not a good game. This is not just me being picky or pedantic; this is an objectively terrible game.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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