Review Legacy: Dark Shadows Developer: Razbor Publisher: GMX Media Genre: Adventure Release Date: November 2004 Platform: Review by Alexander Tait January 18, 2005	Walkthrough	Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Anyone looking to return to the cyberpunk environs of Blade Runner need only install Legacy: Dark Shadows. The backgrounds and ideas are overtly borrowed from Philip K. Dick’s thoughts on a post-apocalyptic future. The cities are full of immense skyscrapers, flying cars are the mode of transportation and robots work alongside humans for day-to-day survival. It is eternally raining and bleak and the streets are littered and seedy. But, before you arrive in 2138, the back-story is set (or rather, mysteriously alluded to) in Stalingrad, 1941.

The introduction is cinematically moody, presented in grainy black and white a little like 1940’s newsreel footage. You play the character of Jevgenij (Yevgeny) Borisov, a journalist from the Russian Moskovske Izvestie who is unfortunate enough to be in a trench in the thick of the 1941 Stalingrad war zone during the German invasion. Seconds after looking out over the killing fields, he returns to the bunker. Fortunately for him, this saves his life as an airplane crashes outside the bunker. Searching the plane’s wreckage, he discovers a wooden box containing files. What is the secret of the box that is so important to the Germans? This is what you will discover many years in the future as you flash forward to 2138…

You now play as Ren Silver, private investigator, about to enjoy a well-deserved break from Earth on the less hostile tourist world of Mars. Formerly with the police, she was fired for obstinacy. In her time as a P.I. she built a small network of allies: Ted, a journalist, Hacker, an enigmatic android with a strange affinity for a dolphin, and a laboratory geek called Charles who lives across the hall in her apartment complex. After beginning her vacation on Mars, Hacker calls her back to Earth when Ted goes missing. It is not long, however, before she returns to Mars, this time in an investogatory capacity following up a 200-year old secret. Ren must search both the written and architectural history of Earth to discover the truth and then put a stop to it. Other influences soon become evident in Legacy: Dark Shadows and this game could be described as Nightlong meets Blade Runner meets Planet of the Apes.

The first thing that strikes the player in this game is the visual aspect. The designers describe the game engine as “2.5D”, with up to 20000 polygons in high-resolution (1024x768) textures with 32-bit color. There are numerous effects such as water, smoke, shadows, and fire and characters are “3D”. There are more than 230 different screens in twelve locations as diverse as Mars, Stalingrad, a spaceship, and an asteroid. It is evident that Razbor has a lot of pride in their game engine. Yes, the backgrounds are suitably dark and futuristic, but more importantly, adventure gamers now have their very own Lara Croft! Following a recent trend in adventure games, the protagonist is female. However, her attire and movements do betray that she was created by men: Ren does not walk anywhere, she slinks seductively but not completely realistically, her clothes are tight fitting and revealing, which in itself is not strange, except that none of the other characters wear this type of clothing and Ren herself often makes snide remarks to overt male sexism, a direct contrast to her choice of attire!

There is voice acting throughout the game but it is all heavily accented. This itself is not a bad thing except that there are characters in the game who are supposed to have American accents, which come across as cartoonish and heavy-handed. There are subtitles also, which make understanding the sometimes-thick accents easier. Except for the thick accents, the voice acting is not unbearable but is not stellar by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly, to my ear, it is easier to deal with the Slavic consonants than to bear the unrealistic bouncing positivity of the acting in the early Nancy Drew games. The game developers describe the engine as having 5.1 sound and professional sound effects but the sound left little impression on me so perhaps the developers went for quality rather than quantity. I would best describe sound as adequate.

The game ships on three CD-ROMs and installs fully to the hard drive thereby eliminating the need to swap disks while playing. It has a simple point and click interface and involves no timed sequences or actions. The player can use all three mouse buttons. The left mouse button is for interaction while the right mouse button accesses the inventory/PDA including a camera, a futuristic lock pick, and the game log. The middle mouse button can be used to examine documents and items more closely. Dialogs can be skipped with the space bar. I didn’t like not being able to see the previous games I had saved when saving a new game because I like to be able to number my games systematically i.e. “Alex01”, “Alex02” etc. Legacy just asks for a save name. Saved games can not be deleted. A strange thing I noticed when I had more save games than were displayed was that I had to click an arrow pointing in the opposite direction to the direction that I expected the games to be. This is confusing, I know, but you will see what I mean when you play it. These are obviously just niggles rather than game-defeating flaws. The game does not come with a manual. The shortcut to the manual installed on the hard drive attempts to link to the Legacy homepage. This was disappointing to me, as I do not expect to have to be online just to be able to read the readme.

I played two versions of this game (North American and European) and both had a few idiosyncrasies. The biggest problem encountered I suspect has something to do with the game not shutting down fully on closing. No matter what I did after closing the game, I had to restart the computer to do anything else. If I did not restart the computer, it would freeze. The same thing happened on the odd occasion that the game crashed to the desktop. A bigger problem that happened about halfway through the game seemed to relate to memory leaks. I noticed that the voice-overs cut out intermittently and then disappeared altogether. This was shortly followed by the game crashing. After uninstalling, reinstalling, and then restarting the game, the problems were there from the start so it may be that this problem is not related to the game itself. Whatever the case, I recommend saving frequently.

Despite a variety of gameplay issues, this was still a game I enjoyed a lot. Gameplay is linear, but refreshing in its use of locales and inventory. It is on the easy side so there is little frustration in playing. The storyline was intriguing and drove me to play further and uncover more of the mystery. It lacks the depth of the Gabriel Knight series, but honestly, how many games come close to that level of research and game development? .

The game was created by Razbor (official site www.razbor.net) studios, a Croatian developer. The game’s homepage is www.legacythegame.com. They invite comments of any type and have a forum on their website. There is a patch (700kB) for installation problems, which I discovered on the forums. Contact them directly to get it or with any other problems: info@razbor.net or info@legacythegame.com. They even list a contact for press and business relations: pr@legacythegame.com!

Final Grade: B-
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System Requirements:

• Windows 98/98SE/2000/XP
• Pentium 650MHz processor
• 128MB RAM
• 1800MB hard drive space
• DirectX 8.1-compatible video card (32MB)
• DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card
• CD-ROM drive
• Mouse and keyboard