Din’s Legacy finished its early access and went into full release as of 28th August. Din’s Legacy is an action RPG which gives you a great array of character development options with regards to its extensive spec building options. There are over 30 classes to choose from with a large variety of play styles cross those eg. melee, ranged, caster, tank, healer along with many blends. This has been further expanded with the very clever mutation aspect which allows the player to blend skills from different classes which allows even stronger individual customisation and can create some really unique builds.
The game’s environments and objectives are procedurally generated with different win/lose conditions each play through. Character data is carried forward with each successful win or loss, allowing the player to continue to develop their current build across worlds. This gives the game a vast amount of replay value for the cost. Classes are unlocked during play with only a handful available to a new player. The unlocks appear to progress at a decent rate. I managed to unlock around eight additional classes in ten hours of play and while these unlocks will slow down over time, it should be possible to unlock all or most of the classes within a play window of 40 to 60 hours. Further to the class unlocks there is also a number of achievements, some of which present some real challenges, so the game is by no means finished when you unlock that last class. It could conceivably take hundreds of hours to complete every achievement in the game, which is quite a staggering scope for an indie game.
Further to the 30 available classes, the new mutation mechanic also allows players to change class while carrying a few of their abilities from their old build into their new one using mutation points. Mutation points build according to a progress bar, similar to levelling, which once full grants a point and can trigger new mutation abilities to appear. These can be developed or supressed according to the player’s wishes by using the characters available mutation points, similar to the general character build skill point system. It might sound complicated, managing two separate ability points based systems, but I found the two systems merged and complimented each other well, and never felt like two separate systems just tacked together.
The overall gameplay does remain rather hack and slash, but the ability to control the size and difficulty of the world, in the world building screen, does allow a player to tailor the game more to their personal needs. For example, as someone who loves exploration but isn’t quite so excited by hacking down wave after wave of mobs, the new exploration option that has been added to the world building screen, which reduces the number of monster spawns on the map, did a great job of moving the balance from combat heavy to a lighter more open world exploration feel. In contrast, if someone prefers heavy combat and less exploration then they could set the world creation to small and select the overrun option which increases the number of monster spawns on the generated map.
The questing system and dungeons work very much as they did in previous titles. The graphics have been improved but are still limited by the game engine which has been carried over from previous titles. There has been some improvements in the variety of terrains generated with more variation in terrain height and features. There’s no denying that the graphics are the game’s main weakness. They are very outdated in terms of what other games produce, but are tied to the need to be able to procedurally generate the environments. However, it also gives the game the handy feature of being able to be run on potato systems which makes it great to run on smaller notebooks or on tablets for gaming on the move.
Overall, this is a great indie title which gives a lot of gameplay for your money. The new explorer mode makes it much more new player friendly. So, if you tried one of the previous titles and found it too unforgiving and overwhelming while getting started then I would suggest that you to give this game a try. Selecting the new exploration option, will give new players more breathing space in order to get to grips with the basics before plunging fully in.
