Legacy: Steel & Sorcery does for me what Dark and Darker tried and failed to do: deliver a fun, highly replayable fantasy extraction game—one that has dug its little hooks into my brain and left me thoroughly addicted. I’ve briefly paused my Legacy: Steel & Sorcery grind to tell you that this Early Access game is full of heart, style, and fun mechanics, though it does have room for improvement before it leaves its Early Access playtest.
Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is an extraction looter set in a unique fantasy universe. If you’re unfamiliar with what an extraction looter game is, the premise is fairly simple: either alone or with a party of friends (three total is what you can currently have in Legacy: Steel & Sorcery), you enter a large, open-world map with one objective: loot! Various bosses and key locations are scattered throughout the map, along with tons of enemies and other players. Generally, the rule is simple: the greater the risk, the greater the reward, with the best loot—new weapons, armor, trinkets, and highly valuable treasures—being found by delving into the deepest, most dangerous areas, fighting bosses, or, for the ultimate prize, killing another player whose inventory is full of the precious loot they collected themselves.
When your inventory is full or when you’re feeling like the risk is too high for the potential reward, you can exfiltrate or “extract” from the map at specific locations. Doing so returns you to the main menu, where you can interact with vendors and crafting stations, equip your character, and store your loot. Your gear and loot are persistent, with limited equipment slots and an inventory that you bring into the game, separate from your greater stash. If you die before you manage to extract from a run, you lose everything you’ve collected in your on-person inventory, including your equipped weapons and armor. Thus, this genre of game has an inherently high-risk factor as well as an incredible feeling of reward when you manage to escape with big loot and build up your stash.
Though its general gameplay loop is very similar to others in the genre, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery switches things up through its core mechanics and setting.
As you can already tell, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is set in a somewhat generic, albeit heavily stylized, fantasy setting. The variety of enemies available at the time of writing will not wow you with their concepts; you have your typical wolves, goblins, skeletons, and giant spiders to deal with. Where the game makes these familiar concepts interesting is through its stylization: characters—from players to enemies—are phenomenally designed, with an emphasis on exaggeration that makes everything all the more pleasing to observe. Warriors are massive, bulky creatures, goblins have gigantic heads, and the rogue’s posture is atrocious, giving him a super-pleasing silhouette.
Beyond the originality of the game’s stylization, it simply just looks really good. The color choices are great, and the map is vast and full of gorgeous scenery without needing a next-gen graphics card to run at high frames.
I would describe the overall vibe of the game’s aesthetic as World of Warcraft meets Conan: The Barbarian comics.
Spiritually related to the game’s setting and another way in which Legacy: Steel & Sorcery stands out from other titles in the genre is the game’s mechanics. Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is a third-person ARPG-style game with a familiar style of stat progression and leveling up, with better gear being essential to becoming stronger. Each of the game’s current four classes has their own abilities, giving them their different playstyles, with the Tanky Warrior, the damage-dealing Rogue, the healing caster Priest, and the ranged Hunter. Each class is fun in its own way, but I have a preference for the rogue, and I have only seen a single other Hunter yet in my multiplayer games, despite most of the gear drops being for her class.
I don’t have a lot to say about the combat mechanics, beyond simply saying that they’re good. Hit feedback is nice, abilities have generous refresh times, and there is good synergy with your armor and weapons thanks to passive effects. Enemies are tanky enough to be a challenge without feeling oppressive. I can’t really tell you how balanced PvP is, but I will say that I have yet to win a fight on my alone. I’m also bad at video games, so take that as you will.
Being in Early Access, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery has some issues that need to be worked out. Namely, the occasional bug was present in my games that made things a little frustrating at times. The most notable bug was a single instance of my animation being stuck during a rogue ability, leading to me dying and dropping a lot of loot. There also seems to be a game-wide problem with the proximity chat: every single player I’ve heard on a mic had terrible-sounding audio, and I had people say the same about mine when I know my mic is good elsewhere.
The game could really use a customization system, allowing players to choose the looks and gender of their classes. Please, let me play as a female warrior or a male priest. Gender-locked classes irk me for some reason, and the complete inability to personalize your classes at present, beyond the clothes they wear, kinda sucks.
Also, at the time of writing, all of the characters in the game are Caucasian-presenting, or at least white-skinned. I’m not usually the kind of reviewer to comment on identity politics in my games, but some simple player customization options could go a long way to adding some better representation to the game.
Everything else that I could think to request from the game, including more classes, more maps, and new game modes, is promised to come. So, as long as the developers keep that promise, I think Legacy: Steel & Sorcery will be an ultimately fantastic game—one that does what Dark & Darker does, but much better.
Pros:
- Great extraction looter and third-person ARPG mechanics
- An incredibly stylized fantasy world that will capture you with its environment and character designs
Cons:
- Some minor bugs and lacking in customization features in the game’s current state
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