Co-op roguelite meets one of the Brothers Grimm’s best-known stories in Seven Dwarfs: Legends Untold.
Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick and Quee, or the verb-y ones, are out though. Instead Surprised Turtles’ dwarves have names that play into their particular skillset: Doc will heal, Archie is an archer and Thor has a honking massive hammer. You, and up to three other friends, take on the roles of these heroes and have to fight your way through Seven Dwarfs: Legends Untolds‘ world as you try to defeat the evil queen.
I played through a bunch of it while I was at Courage XL, a fringe event around GDC, and had quite a lot of fun. Each of the seven characters felt substantially different from one another, and it allowed myself and the other players to not only work in synch, but switch characters in and out mid-level if the situation took a turn for the worse. It all felt really dynamic, as did the way that you tweak and refine your characters as you play. At certain points you spend points that you’ve accrued through the level, and you do that by voting for character (rather than a player’s version of a character) upgrades. This is really fun and creates a very interesting political element as players have to discuss and argue in favour of upgrading the characters they prefer vs improving the team.
What I would say is that it’s much more fun to play than it is to watch. A lot of the characters have one main accent colour, but otherwise, they’re very similar to the rest of the world and enemy characters – various shades of murky greens, faded blues and greys. The accent colours are welcome, and they are unique to the characters, which makes them easy to spot and follow around the level, but it does mean that there isn’t much visually popping on screen.
Roguelite and co-op don’t often play well together, and — to be honest — this feels much more like a modern take on the ‘Street ’em up’ than anything else. Whatever you want to call what Seven Dwarfs: Legends Untold does, it plays great.
Seven Dwarfs: Legends Untold is in development for PC & Mac, you can find out more details on its Steam page.
