Developer: Almost Human Games
Publisher: Almost Human Games
Rrp: £11.99
Released: 11th April 2012
Available on Steam, gog.com and their own site
Played using: Mouse and Keyboard
I probably should have reviewed this one before doing Legend of Grimrock 2 huh? It certainly would have made my life easier… Oh well. I’ll be honest, much of what I say here may as well be copy and pasted from my review of Legend of Grimrock 2 as much of it has little to no difference to this title . That being said it’s always nice to revisit the progenitor of a series.
In Legend of Grimrock you play as a party of four prisoners who have been thrown into the pit atop Grimrock Mountain. If you should make it out alive you will be granted a full pardon, but so far all have perished in its depths.
As with its sequel this game gives you an option (besides the difficulty setting) to make the game more challenging, including that old favourite ‘old school mode’. Old school mode turns of the auto-mapping feature so you will need either a great memory or lots of grid paper.
You can also choose to create your own custom characters or start with the stock set, if it’s your first time playing I’d suggest going with the ones you are given by default, as they’re quite well rounded.
One of the first things many new players are going to notice is that movement isn’t freeform in this game. In this game everything, including you, moves on a grid system (hence why in old school mode grid paper is so helpful). Because of this the controls include buttons to make you turn. So [W],[A],[S] and [D] control movement as they would in most FPS games but if you want to change the direction you face you have to press either [Q] to turn left or [E] for right.
To swing your weapon you click the right mouse button while hovering over the weapon of the character you want to perform the attack with… Unless you want them to use magic, but we’ll cover that later.
Clicking the right mouse button over your characters portrait brings up their inventory and equipment screen, this screen also shows their hunger status and experience bar. If you want a more indepth look at the various stats of your character you just need to click the small tab on the left of the screen that appears. The tab below that is for allocating points that are given once you level up.
The skill system that Legend of Grimrock uses is quite simple. Each level that a character gains they are given four points, these points can be spent on the skills that are shown on the skill menu. The thing is, you need to put a certain amount of points on a particular skill for it to actually unlock anything of use.
Magic is a tricky affair in the game, the system they use is easy to understand but relies a lot on memory. To cast a spell you have to right click on the spell casters equipment, then click the appropriate runes for the spell you wish to cast. If you have enough mana, appropriate skill level and the correct runes you’ll successfully cast the spell. Thing is some of these spells are several runes long and in the middle of combat that can be a bit of a issue. Also unlike its sequel The Legend of Grimrock doesn’t record what spells you’ve learnt, meaning that either you have to memorise the runes, keep the scrolls that tell you the spells runes or physically write them down.
As you wander the halls of this dungeon your characters will need to eat, thankfully food, while not plentiful, can be found within the dungeon. When you consume said food not only does it delay a characters starvation but it also grants a some health. Health can also be recovered through sleeping and touching a crystal of life (this also resurrects dead characters and saves).
The base game of Legend of Grimrock is quite short, the whole thing lasted me approximately twelve hours. Thankfully though you can create your own dungeons to play as well as import ones made by others, there are several websites that created some amazing campaigns and Steam has quite a lot of user created content available on its workshop pages.
I played this game with all the graphical settings at maximum, and if I’m honest I needn’t have bothered. The very nature of the game and setting mean that the graphics themselves are secondary. I mean your in a dark dungeon so it’s not like you need a great amount of draw distance and the amount of enemies you’ll see on screen at once can usually be counted on one hand. It’s by no means a ugly game, except where it means to be, and all the enemies are well designed and memorable (I frigging hate the spiders for example… Damn things always poison me when I have no antidote).
This game is great, especially given its price tag, and has lots of room for expansion from community sources. Anyone who loves RPG’s would be hard pressed to find a better game without going to the likes of the Elder Scrolls series. I will admit I do think the sequel is generally better though.
