Grimm: Dark Legacy is, in a nutshell, a light-survival with rogue-lite options if you so wish.
I’ve had this on my wishlist on Steam for sometime as I used to watch the TV series on the NBC channel (which has just entered it’s final season) so I jumped at the chance at reviewing this and as you might expect dear reader is in the lore of the TV show but sadly what I was hoping for just ain’t there. Big dark levels oozing with life and substance with knowledge on the “Wesen’s” and the other evil creatures Nick Burkhardt had to fight in the supernatural series as a cop.
The game starts asking if you want to choose offline mode (single player only) or online mode (you and up to 3 of your friends that have the game on Steam – There’s no lobby finder to play with strangers on the internet). Then you’re taken to the main menu where you can find the options, quit, or start your game. When you choose to start the game you get to create up to 5 characters, either a male or female “toon” you want to play as and which difficulty you want to play as being;
- Easy – On easy mode, the game is saved each time you enter a village. Upon death, you will start from your latest save point.
- Rogue – On rogue mode your character will have to start from the very first mission upon death. You will however get to keep all money and items.
- Iron man – On iron man mode your character will be deleted upon death and you will lose money, progression and items.
Once a difficulty has been chosen along with your character name, it’s off to the intro video which introduces you to the history of the world of Grimm and the two main characters of the TV show, Nick and his police partner, Hank finding out about a Grimm in the late 15th century, and this is the part where you, the player comes in.
You start off in Spain in a short but sweet tutorial learning how to move, using combat, and skinning your killed prey along with crafting skills. After that it’s up to you what you want to do, you can either follow the story missions through Spain, or you can go through the repeatable hunting tasks to gain meat, and if you’re very lucky whilst exploring you might bump into a chest containing blueprints.
Blueprints are needed to craft new things like weapons, shields, improved backpack, and the ability to cook new recipes either in town or outside of town. Cooking outside of town does require your own campfire, which you can craft yourself so it always pays off to explore as much of a map as possible as the map gets uncovered as you explore in your own map by pressing “M” whilst on a mission / hunt.
Whilst on missions or hunting you’ll notice these coloured flashes at the side of the screen, and if you hold “Q” and move your mouse you get to see a bit further past the screens field of view and find out what is making your screen flash like that. It’s either going to be a natural creature like a Doe, Hare, Toad etc, or it could be something more sinister like a Wessen or a Werewolf to most people. Later on you’ll find even harder creatures to deal with, like elemental witches who launch fireballs at you, and a piper that summons a never ending supply of rats that want to gnaw at your ankles, unless of course you take down the piper first…and fast. It ain’t fun as there’s too many damn rats on the screen to do anything but die.
The best thing about the game, for myself anyway, was the foot prints (I know sounds simple but hear me out) you’ll notice that all individual animal have their own unique footprint, and you can track whichever way they’re walking/heading, and that way you can either attempt to run and waste your precious yellow bar (circle line just around your heart in the top left of the screen) or attempt to stealthily follow, something I can’t stand in this game because there’s no notification to determine how hard your walking or how quiet you are (ala Beyond Despair) but you do get ranged weapons (bows & crossbows) and traps (bear traps and others) in Grimm: Dark Legacy, but they are very forgettable even though you place them in your belt and pressing the numbers corresponding to the items are shown on bottom of the screen.
There are 10 area’s within the game, Spain and all the way up to Norway with around 6 or 7 main missions to do varying from kill “X” from this, or talk to “Y” or maybe even pick up “Z” amount of berries. The missions themselves are flat out boring ‘cos its the kind of stuff you can do in a free-to-play MMO.
Yes the graphics look colourful but for fans of the series or even just myself, I thought this would be a-lot darker and moodier then what it actually is. It just seems as if someone saw Don’t Starve and thought they could use that as a stepping stone.
Artplant if your reading this, I truly love Entropy but this just feels a little bit too rushed, almost as if you got rushed by the Publisher you used (GamesCo) and it does show, with typo’s such as “list” instead of “lost” which showed in one of my screenshots and among the other reasons that I’ve wrote about above.
