Legend of Grimrock - Highly recommended

I have to admit that I am totally hooked with the new game Legend of Grimrock that I mentioned in my previous post. The game plays out in the same genre as Dungeon Master and Black Crypt.

You create a group of four characters from four races and three classes (fighter, mage and rogue). You start out as prisoners that are sentenced down into the mountain of Grimrock. If you don´t want to die there you have to find a way out. Thats about it. From there on the game plays out like the classical dungeon crawler and I want to highlight a few points:

• The graphics are very good and well into todays standard. Lightning sources from torches etc reflects very well. Enemies are well animated and the dungeon layout top notch.
• Everything plays out in realtime. The front fighters hack with their melee weapons the second row throw objects, fire ranged weapons or spells.
• Each character has his set of abilities like wisdom, strength, vitality and energy and a set of different skills. Each level up gives you four skill points to spend on the different skills.
• Mages cast spells using a combination of runes that must be set in realtime in order to be cast.
• You could either try out rune-combination your self to find new spells if you are of eligible spell level or hope to find scolls that tells you the combination.
• You could use alchemy to create potions

You have an excellent automap to your help that are drawn much in resemblance to your own manual drawings once upon a time. The level designs are excellent with a lot of puzzles. The challenge is just about right. When coming down to level 3, 4 and 5 the difficulty increases gradually. Some puzzles are really tough. There are a lot of secret rooms and hidden treasures in the game. Don´t forget that your characters needs food to survive and regenerate health and energy. That will become a problem later on.

There are already a lot of reviews of this game around the net. If you want to know more check out one of these:

Review #1

Review #2

I am currently at level 5 and will be playing this for the time being. There will be no update on Anvil of Dawn for awhile. This new game comes highly recommended for old-school dungeon-crawler fans. For its price, its a bargain.