

There aren’t a great deal of choices in these trees, though. So warriors choose from the likes of battle tactics and weapon block, mages pick from abilities such as fireball and ice arrow, villains take feint and deadly blow, and so forth. Skills are doled out in trees based on these paths, and they can be purchased with points earned every time you level up.

Select the paths of wilderness and the warrior, for instance, and you create a ranger good with bows. This essentially allows you to mold Targon into a dual-class character, blending traits of the warrior, mage, cleric, thief, and ranger. Character development is certainly clear-cut, as you choose two skill paths from five total choices presented at the start of the game. Gameplay mechanics are equally uncomplicated.

Legend lays out the demon-horde angle from the moment the action begins and gets you started on the hunt for the Hand of God at the end of the first major quest, so at least there isn’t any cheap attempt to make this derivative tale seem loftier than it really is. Sound familiar? The storytelling is straightforward, at least. Your mission is to track down these shards, reforge the Hand of God, and use it to chase the flaming guys with horns back down to hell. This mystical MacGuffin is the only thing that can seal the portal that the demons are using, but, of course, the artifact has been broken into three pieces and hidden throughout the land. The key to shutting down a recently established demonic mass transit system is–you guessed it–the Hand of God. You play Targon, a typical studly RPG hero, who’s out to rid his medieval fantasy world of Aris of a nasty demon infestation. Going through so much hassle isn’t exactly worthwhile, either, considering the cliched game design. It’s hard to tell if this is an Nvidia or a Legend issue, but the end result is a lot of unnecessary frustration. Only a last-ditch Google search hit pay dirt, coming up with the advice that you could work around the PhysX error by deleting the PhysXCore.dll file in the game directory. Trying various Nvidia video and PhysX drivers did nothing to solve this problem. It constantly aborted during startup on our test machine, dropping back to the desktop with the error message that PhysX couldn’t be initialized. You might not be able to get the game running in the first place, as Legend has some serious bugs in its implementation of PhysX, Nvidia’s separately-installed physics software.
