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The world learned about Fallen Legion for the first time on PlayStation Experience in 2016. Right after the announcement, it was rather quiet about her. So quiet that when I played it for the first time, I completely forgot that I had heard about this title before.
The game was released in two versions. Subtitled Sins of the Empire on PS4 and Flames of Rebellion on PSV. Theoretically, these are the same games, but each of them has a different protagonist. To fully get to know the history of Fallen Legion, we would have to buy both editions and finish them on two consoles.
But where does such a discrepancy come from? Well, in the game we learn the history of the empire of Pheumia – a land ruled by the not-so-liked emperor. At the beginning of our story, we meet Laendur and Octavie. They are on the battlefield. He – a meritorious general, she – the daughter of the ruler. When news of death reaches the front, we meet Grimoire, a strange magic book. She claims to have advised the former ruler and knows a secret that helped him keep the state in check. We are talking about a strange magic that allows you to summon eternally loyal soldiers. Laendur, terrified by how Octavia changes under the influence of the book, decides to become the hero of the peoples and start an uprising. The heir to the throne, at the urging of a new friend, collects the souls of the innocent and builds an army of Exemplars out of them. Laendur intends to free her from Grimore’s influence in the first place, and eventually seize the throne anyway.
To be able to face it, our hero goes deep into the empire to recruit units. However, he quickly learns the power of the book and, like Octavia, decides to use the Exemplars. They are not entirely human beings, they are based on the souls of fallen heroes of the empire. Thanks to this, we can freely heal them or resurrect them with magic.
The fight with their help takes place using the buttons on the pad and consists in giving orders. Each Exemplar is assigned to one button and has two types of attack. Normal and special that activates after you punch the appropriate chain of blows. The chain breaks if we do not take action for too long or when we are attacked. In order to avoid the enemy’s blows, you must block them just before taking damage. A perfect defense allows you to quickly regenerate action points and, in the case of projectiles and magic, to deflect the attack and launch a counterattack. The system sounds a bit chaotic, but it works very well. Once we manage to learn the pattern of enemy behavior and master the perfect blocking, the fight begins to be a lot of fun. I really like the game system and will be happy to check out the PS4 version someday. Mainly because the Vite version is currently unstable. I had a problem with a lot of fights, mostly boss fights. When a lot was happening on the screen, the game was very frantic, the animation jumped to such an extent that it became impossible to block the opponent’s movement. Hopefully these are only temporary issues and will be fixed in future patches.
An additional element of the fights are decisions made between fights. From time to time, information about the status of the war and 3 cards appears on the screen. Each of them carries a different decision and a different bonus for our units. When advertising the title, the creators said that the decisions would have a big impact on the plot. While, after taking a few of them, you can see that the morale indicator among the troops increases or decreases, the game does not inform us if it matters. The souls we control do not get any additional morale-related attributes. Likewise, there is no information whether their stats change permanently due to the selected cards. There are no numerical data about our units anywhere in the game, which makes it really difficult to assess the impact of decisions on the game. In the game, we also do not raise the level of the characters, neither our protagonist nor the Exemplars. If we have a problem with a certain level, the only thing we can do is try to change tactics or choose other units. However, a lot depends on our dexterity and how quickly we master perfect blocking.
In terms of history, it all starts very interesting. Over time, Laender changes and ceases to resemble the hero we met at the beginning of the game. Occasional scenes and dialogues try to explain his motives, but feel that the creators lost somewhere while writing the story. Despite the choice of cards and completing the levels at key moments, we have nothing to say and we observe a linear storyline. Sometimes cut scenes are dubbed, which turned out to be numb. The actors read the dialogues with virtually no emotions, which is additionally disappointing because the music perfectly reflects the action of the title. Not many games lately make me remember melodies that accompany me in a fight or during an intro. In the case of Fallen Legion, I will remember the soundtrack long after the game is over.
From the visual side, there is nothing to complain about. Characters and enemies are nicely drawn, the locations are also full of nothing. The whole thing resembles the Dragon’s Crown style.
Fallen Legion could be a very good game. It has an interesting, easy-to-learn combat system, but also complicated enough to spend some time on it. I like the aspect of the two narratives, my only regret is that I need to have two copies of the game to get to know them. I sincerely hope that the current frame rate issues are temporary and will be fixed in a future patch.
I really appreciate that the creators invested in Vite and made a port for this console, in my opinion, this task unfortunately exceeded them. From the interestingly promising title came the average, which additionally does not work well.
It’s hard for me to recommend Fallen Legion to a wider audience, fans of the genre will surely find something for themselves. For those who do not play action RPG, there is nothing here that would encourage them to try other titles of this type.
Portal Rating: 5.5
Fallen Legion: Flames of Rebellion was provided by the game publisher: YummyYummyTummy.
