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Warriors: Legends of Troy Review for Xbox 360

Warriors: Legends of Troy Review for Xbox 360

The Rage of Achilles

The Trojan War seems like the perfect fit for a video game. It’s extremely violent, the lack of modern weaponry requires a much different type of strategy than today’s wars, and people back then actually believed enough in crazy mythological creatures to legitimize the appearance of such monstrosities. The Warriors series decides to capitalize on all this with its newest title, Warriors: Legends of Troy.

Players are plopped into the shoes of various Greek and Trojan heroes and must complete various missions to help give their side the edge in battle. These missions have players do things like ransack granaries, dismantle clifftop defenses, protect civilians, and capture enemy strongholds. The gameplay involves a lot of hacking and slashing with swords and axes, with a little bit of shield action thrown in for good measure.

Warriors: Legends of Troy Screenshot

To make it easier to hit targets on the 3D landscape, there is a lock-on feature that allows players to focus on a single target. Sadly, this feature is so poorly implemented that it’s pretty much only useful during one-on-one combat. In large battles, the target that gets locked-onto feels completely random. I’ve had instances where I’ve had a fair amount of enemy soldiers directly in front of me, yet hitting the lock-on button sent my focus to a soldier who was off in the distance somewhere. And if you pan the camera in front of the character to lock onto an enemy behind you, your character will still throw items straight ahead rather than at the locked target. This can be extremely frustrating for players comfortable with the much superior lock-on systems found in games like Red Dead Redemption.

While swinging your weapon wildly is generally effective, there are a few strategic elements that must be used in order to survive these battles. For example, the opening scene has you hold your shield up over your head every time a volley of arrows is launched. Yet this mechanic is drastically overused within the first fifteen minutes of the game as it becomes painfully awkward to watch an entire battlefield of soldiers simultaneously stop fighting to hold up their shields.

Warriors: Legends of Troy Screenshot

Groups of soldiers will often include a captain or commander of some sort with a lot more health than the average fighter. Killing this commander will cause nearby soldiers to lose their cool and often make really dumb mistakes like dropping their shields. Sometimes these freaked-out warriors will even flee the battle completely.

Legends of Troy also allows players to pick up the weapons of fallen enemies and either use them in combat or throw them. This is especially fun when you’ve already taken down an enormous pile of enemies and get to hurl projectiles at those who are trying to flee. This concept, by far, provides for the most entertaining moments of the game. Yet even this great feature has a major flaw: whenever a cutscene loads, any weapons a player has picked up will disappear. Getting your hands on a really great weapon (like a spear) is so much less rewarding when you know that the item will disappear as soon as you hit the next plot point.

Warriors: Legends of Troy Screenshot

At various points in the story, players will swap between characters, all of which are powerful heroes of either Greece or Troy. Each has his or her own playstyle and default weapon loadout. My favorite of these is Penthesilea, the Amazonian queen with a gigantic axe that will slice through anyone who comes even remotely close to her, while my least favorite character is definitely Ajax, whose strength is offset by his lack of weapons.

Completing missions will reward Kleos, which can be spent on various power-up items like rings and such. These items are stored in a grid – very similar to the item system in Resident Evil 4. Equipping an item will require you to find space on the grid for it, often keeping you rearranging your items in various combinations to get everything to fit.

Warriors: Legends of Troy Screenshot

While I personally think the Trojan War is an incredible story, the version in Legends of Troy suffers for its lack of focus. Sure, Homer’s Iliad (one of the major inspirations for Legends of Troy) tends to bounce back and forth between the Greek and Trojan sides, but when players get to actually step into the shoes of characters from the story, it’s important that the choices they make ultimately matter. In Legends of Troy, you’ll spend forty-five minutes thinning the ranks of the Trojan army, and when you finally feel like you’re actually impacting the battle, you suddenly switch sides and slice your way through a whole bunch of Greeks. Instead of helping the player relate to both sides of the conflict, this technique only makes the player feel alienated from the characters. Do you really want to try to sympathize with the mighty Ajax, only to have to best him in hand-to-hand combat a little later in the story?

Some of the mission scenarios are so poorly conceived that they simply become laughable. For example, you spend one entire mission defending a battering ram. When the ram encounters a wall that it cannot get through, Ajax shows up to Hulk-smash it down. Which makes you wonder: if Ajax can bust through walls that even this battering ram can’t, why on Earth would you waste so much of Ajax’s effort on guarding this thing? This whole scenario could have played out so much more smoothly if someone would have just said “to Hades with this whole battering ram, let’s just let Ajax smash his way into the stronghold for us.” And to make this mission even more humiliating, the battering ram animations look completely awful.

When you add up the flawed gameplay, the poorly written story, a very short campaign (between ten and twelve hours), and absolutely no multiplayer whatsoever, Legends of Troy simply doesn’t contain enough content to keep even the most devoted Trojan War fans satisfied for very long. Completing missions in the campaign will unlock additional game modes, but none of them have any real staying power. Consider renting this game for a weekend, but there’s simply not enough to do for this to be worth its $60 price tag.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 2.6 Graphics
Legends of Troy doesn’t do anything special. Some of the cutscenes look like they could use some work, and the framerate tends to drop when there are too many warriors on the screen at once. 3.4 Control
The controls work for the most part, but they would definitely feel a lot better if the lock-on function were more intuitive. 3.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Music and sound fx are pretty much what you’d expect. There are some pretty bad voice acting moments in the game, though, and some hilarious mispronunciations. 2.7 Play Value
Once the ten- to twelve-hour campaign is over, there are a few additional gameplay modes to try out. But they get old pretty fast. You could easily rent this game over the weekend and be done with it. 2.8 Overall Rating – Average
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Ancient Heroes: Play as infamous heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus from Greece, as well as Hektor and Paris from Troy.
  • Epic Battlefields: Clash with legions of soldiers on glorious battlegrounds that reach for miles throughout the ancient world.
  • Strategic Carnage: Do anything to survive. Grab a sword from a fallen enemy and hurl it at a soldier bearing down on you. Smash an opponent with your shield, and then run your spear through him. Or just throttle them with your bare hands.
  • Legendary Battles: Battle larger-than-life heroes and even confront mythical creatures sent by the gods themselves.
  • Brutal History: Among the inspirations for the game are The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem from the 9th century BC, and in-depth research of the ancient battlefields of the Trojan War.

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