Legend: Hand of God Demo

In a land tarnished by war, demons and the dark forces of evil, only the power of an ancient artifact can save the human race from extinction. However, a brave hero is needed to go and search for it, especially since no one really knows where it is and many perils await those who venture into such endeavors alone.

Legend: Hand of God is an action-RPG that allows you to become this hero and try to save the land from certain doom, as you take on a dangerous quest to retrieve a powerful artifact, called simply the Hand of God. Along the way, you have to defeat endless hordes of demons, apparitions, monsters and even humans, all of which have one or more reasons to stop you from achieving your goal.

Right from the first few clicks inside the game, it might become obvious that most of the mechanics are borrowed from other titles, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as they are somehow refined, slightly changed, or re-imagined in a way. However, Legend: Hand of God does not make an effort to do any of that and chooses to simply reuse some mechanics and stack them on top of each other, in an attempt to emulate as many successful games as possible at the same time.

In the end, you are left with something that's incredibly close to Diablo when it comes to mobs, map design and even spells, yet it also integrates elements from Dungeon Siege and various other CRPGs. The gameplay is slower than in Diablo and the enemies are not as intriguing, which can cause severe boredom after a while.

Whenever you manage to kill enough enemies and gather the required amount of experience points, your character can level up and become a bit stronger. Every time this happens, you also receive two skill points and you are able to increase your main attributes as well, in order to unlock better skills and become proficient in a certain field, such as one-handed swords or sorcery.

From a technical point of view, it is worth noting that the game does take advantage of a rather powerful graphics engine, regardless of the isometric interface. Thus, the environments look nice and detailed, although the lack of imagination when it comes to level design fails to get the most out of the potent graphics engine. Moreover, the effort to voice-over every dialog is worth mentioning, although the actors do a poor job most of the time, especially in the case of the main character.

In the end, Legend: Hand of God tried to pick only the biggest apples from the tree, yet it did nothing with them and they just rotted away. The mechanics are there, but they are unrefined, glitched and hard to swallow, especially since the story is just a sequence of cliches and the combat is very dull, regardless of how huge the hammer you swing happens to be.