We like it when games experiment, when roles are reversed, and when points of view change. So much so that, if we look at the current market, we can only be dissatisfied with how little our monster friends are respected and their ideas disclosed. Who are we, after all, to always rise against their fortresses, to massacre them with impunity and to steal from them the treasures accumulated with so much effort over the centuries? Something like that had tried him to do Dungeon Keeper several years ago, but more recently, a few other titles have allowed us to step into the shoes of the villains, perhaps adding that pinch of humour, as essential as the cheese on the tuna pasta. As you may have understood, in short, Legend of Keepers is a new production that wants to do everything except take itself excessively seriously, however hiding, behind nice lines of dialogue and extremely colourful dungeons, some interesting and also quite deep game mechanics. A title certainly to go and discover with our review of Legend of Keepers.
On the side of the bad guys
In Legend of Keepers, we will not play the classic hero.
As was the case with Monster Train last year, Legend of Keepers also starts from a roguelike base, reversing the roles and asking the players to put aside heroic intentions to instead try to defend their possessions from the constant attacks of those characters we usually play. In Legend of Keepers, wizards, barbarian knights and adventurers of all sorts will constantly try to assault the dungeons of your fortresses and you will have to learn over time how to manage a real guild of monsters, trying to defeat the sorties and, at the same time, manage the regular income that killing invaders brings.
You will therefore be a just but determined ruler, ready to sacrifice pawns to prevent the well-intentioned from getting to the loot but also interested in making sure that your subjects, or employees depending on how you want to see it, do not put their lives excessively in danger, given that their eventual departure could affect the morale of the entire army.
We are talking about a reverse Darkest Dungeon, where teams of three creatures must be deployed in the various rooms of the dungeon, alternating them with traps and minibosses. All of this keeping in mind the positioning of the various casters, tanks and assassins, in the hope that the invaders arrive at the final guardian battered and, possibly, afflicted with negative statuses.
Instead of a linear campaign, Legend of Keepers will allow you to choose which of these end-of-level bosses to play, thus changing the subjects available but also enemies and settings, for a more than discreet variety from the point of view of an independent title.
Positioning is the key to victory
In addition to the roles, the key to bringing home victory in Legend of Keepers passes from the need to deploy monsters with resistances and elemental damage in stark contrast to those of the adventurers, thus trying to give life to long-lasting and exhausting clashes, weakening the opponents room after room.
There are five stats to take into consideration, also considering the armour, and two separate pools of points to be brought to zero before being able to stand as a destroyer of invaders. The heroes will not only be killed by bringing their health points to zero but they can also be made to escape. To do this, it will be necessary to directly affect their morale during their explorations, putting ghosts and horrendous creatures in front of them, rather than brute force brutes, two different strategies that will be mixed to take advantage of the weak constitution or particularly cowardly enemies. In this way, a sufficiently deep game system is generated to allow dungeon governors to layer their strategies, while also using entire branches of talents to improve the different skills at their disposal. During the turn-based combat, you will then be able to decide which type of attack to perform or choose, whether to exploit a particular skill precisely to counter a possible onslaught of the good guys, with a very calm pace and able to guarantee all the time necessary to measure one’s actions and anticipate possible consequences. At the end of each session, various activities will arrive to choose from to obtain bonuses, rewards and objects with passive powers with a slightly more interactive design solution than the features already seen on Monster Train, but without reworking them too much. Thus we find ourselves on our hands a very long-lived and highly replayable title, with good visual quality and a rather successful pixel art style.
