Labyrinth Legend Review

Game: Labyrinth Legend
Genre: Action, Role-Playing
System: Switch (also available for Steam)
Developers | Publishers: Regista | NIS America
Age Rating: US E 10+ | EU 7+
Price: US $14.99 | UK £13.49 | EU € 14,99
Early Access Release Date: January 18th, 2022

Review code used, with many thanks to NIS America.

Labyrinth Legend is a dungeon-crawling, pixelated adventure game from Regista and NIS America. It centers around your hero attempting to claim a treasure that has killed many adventurer’s before you.

The Story and Gameplay

The story of Labyrinth Legend is extremely simplistic; the hero of the game is trying to make their way through a massive labyrinth that is rumored to house treasures beyond imagining. As players enter the town nearest to the labyrinth and chat with its townspeople, you find that many adventurers have come before and not a single one has lived to tell the tale.

The townspeople don’t have a whole lot of faith in you making it through the deadly maze However, they are willing to offer you services like mining ore, buying and selling items, and blacksmithing. Players then have the option to head into the labyrinth itself or head to something called Monster Island to level up.

Each section of the labyrinth’s map is split into five maps and one boss map. Players have to find a key for each map, which is hidden inside of one of the many monsters waiting to ambush the hero. Once in possession of that level’s key, players can head through the portal to the next.

The level of difficulty in Labyrinth Legends skyrockets as players level up and come across larger groups of enemies and more difficult elite enemies and bosses. Each new level and new boss brings more and more dangerous attacks, hidden perils, and other dangers to keep a lookout for. Also, each level has a theme with unique color pallets, enemies, flora, and fauna.

There are three unique classes that players can choose from: a magic user, a fighter, and a rogue. I chose to play mostly with the magic user who gains a selection of wands. Each wand creates a different kind of spell for a different amount of damage.

Not only to players get to choose their class, but they can also choose the level of difficulty they wish to play on; there is a casual mode, normal, and hard. Most players will most likely be comfortable playing normal mode.

The Pros of Labyrinth Legend

This game is fast-moving and fun. Players have a lot of choices to make, including weapons, armor, rings, upgrades, and even just which direction to head next. Each level is a little maze that gets more dangerous and more difficult to get around. But also, player’s stats, level, and weapons will also continue to level and be upgraded, giving players a chance to take on even the hardest bosses.

Labyrinth Legends does feature “old-school,” pixel graphics, but it is not to its detriment. The game is colorful, pretty, and the look matches well with the gameplay. The first few levels were a little rough to start for me. But I quickly got used to how enemies indicate attacks and how to defend myself from taking a ton of damage.

While not breaking any new ground, this is a fun game that doesn’t require hours of concentrated attention; I was able to move away from the game whenever I needed to and could come back whenever I had the time.

The Cons of Labyrinth Legend

While I didn’t spend any time playing the other two classes, some of the mage’s weapons seemed to need a little bit of tuning. While each magical staff is filled with a certain type of magic, like a thunder or frost staff, they also were each stamped with an attack number. This number didn’t really seem to matter; I had an three-star explosive staff with a 115 on it that did the same amount of damage as a five-star staff that had a 10 on it. I’m not entirely sure what the numbers mean if its not about DPS.

That being said, being able to choose which staffs get equipped and what attack to use against which enemies was a massive positive. There was a lot of strategy involved in taking down certain enemies while avoiding damage.

The music in the game was very repetitive and extremely annoying. I muted the game after only a few levels; it was hard to keep hearing the same 8-bit tune over and over again.

Conclusion

Labyrinth Legend is fun, but the damage system didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. If there is an algorithm for figuring out how much damage a staff would do, it was not explicitly explained. Hopefully, it was just me being dense!

Also, it was just a little bland for me. There was not much story to invest it, which is a big of a negative for me personally. However, I don’t feel like this would be a negative for many fans of this sort of dungeon crawling adventure game.

Final Verdict: I Like it.