In a world covered in miasma, a floating castle is the last refuge for mankind. The earth is scarred with creatures altered by the plague. Lucien, protected within the castle’s walls, discovers an ancient book where he learns of the Exemplars, weapons that can turn into sentient soldiers. He joins forces with Rowena, determined to find a way to come back to life to raise her living son. The two reluctantly make a pact to overthrow the mad tyrant controlling Welkin.
Real-Time Action RPG
Fallen Legion Revenants is split up into two different kinds of gameplay sections.
In what they call Unearthly Warriors (the core gameplay) you play as Rowena, a revenant. Test your reflexes and tactical skills with real-time battles all while commanding a squad of Exemplars to defeat the foes you face. Each of the Exemplars (and Rowena) are maps to a specific face button. Every attack will cost action points and will recharge over time. Rowena can heal and assist the Exemplars. Blocking is timing based. Time the block perfectly and the attack will be completely blocked or even deflected and will give you the chance to parry the now staggered opponent. Each monster has its own attack animation/pattern for you to learn to block perfectly.
Each Exemplar also has its own death blow. This is a strong attack that can be used when enough MP points are gathered. When an Exemplar is defeated you can revive them by repeatedly tapping the corresponding button.
Narrative and RPG elements
In Forbidden Knowledge, you play as Lucien a charismatic politician. Rather than fighting it goes toward the narrative side of gameplay. Gather information and influence the people within the castle through your dialogue choices to help Rowena on her way. At the end of each battle, you will obtain Archeus. These are skills that you can equip within the castle to your Exemplars to increase their stats. For instance, Idealistic Pugilist +2 increases the wearer’s concentration by 20%. The better you play the more Archeus you can choose. New attacks and Exemplars can be unlocked/obtained within the castle as well to power-up your squad even more.
Hit or Miss
The gameplay loop was really repetitive for me. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem but due to the rather basic gameplay what I would call more hack ’n’ slash than tactical, it got boring pretty quick.
The graphics style looks interesting and can go both ways in terms of liking it. To me, the game has solid textures, animations, and effects going on but the art style looks unpolished to me. The game features voice acting that is pretty well executed although I didn’t feel anything for the story they were telling because it didn’t feel fleshed out at all. It didn’t pull me in and I didn’t feel the connection with the characters or the reason to help them on their way at all. For a game that has a good portion being narrative-driven, it’s really important to have a good story.
Conclusion
Fallen Legion Revenants is good or decent depending on preferences in both gameplay as well as overall presentation. The story feels not fleshed out and didn’t pull me in. A demo of this game is both available on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. Save data will carry over to the full game, so if you are still on the fence about buying it after the review, please check them out.
