Urban Legend is a game that scored pretty high in the final GameTunnel monthly roundup. However, I'm going to need to respectfully disagree with much of the commentary put forth by the panel. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm going to entirely agree with Mr. Derek Yu. So, if you're in a rush, go ahead and read his mini-review now. I'll wait.

Okay, if you're sticking around for this larger scale review, I'll get to it.

Urban Legend is a turn-based urban combat game. You control a squad of hired mercs that you equip and send out on the street to do battle with your enemies and achieve your objectives. Very simple. The game takes place on a grid-based, isometric view field. Each of your units has AP, or action points, that both determine how far they can move each turn and what actions they can perform, all of which will consume some amount of AP.

I'm a big fan of turn-based gaming. I'm also a big fan of the XCom and Rebelstar Command (its spiritual sequel) style of gaming. Urban Legend is praised for embracing that style of strategy-based combat, but something just falls flat in the execution.

The game looks great, to my taste. The graphics are pixel art, and therefore miniaturized (the game defaults at a pretty small 640x480 windowed mode), but are crisp and well done. I never found myself confused as to what I was looking at. Environments and characters look great, in spite of being small.

The story for the game is secondary at best. It begins with you, John Doe, going on an office killing spree to distract from the fact that you're stealing corporate secrets for a contact you have, later nick-named Deepthroat. The gameworld is one where a fast food corporation seems to have brought the world to its knees by developing the only form of fast food in the world that no longer gives people stomach cancer, a fate visited upon mankind by too much genetic engineering. That much is interesting enough, but instead of playing up a future dystopia, the game chooses instead to make jokes about security guards that like to eat donuts and to play up glorified violence in a way I'm sure is meant to be satirical, but is anything but when the game actually does reward you for killing everyone on a level. Caspian Prince stated in the Monthly Roundup that it “has the sort of humour they just don't understand in the US”. This is something that offends me, not as an American, but as a person who is funny. The game is funny like Beavis and Butthead without all the character (because, indeed, Beavis and Butthead ARE funny even though what they say usually isn't). The jokes in Urban Legend are clunky and largely immature. But, as I said, the story is pretty background.

Gameplay itself manages to be frustrating on several fronts. There's no way to save your game mid-mission. Turn-based combat done right can be time-consuming, and a save mode would be excellent. True it promotes power-gaming (saving and reloading until you get the result you want), but that's a gamer's prerogative. It's also an issue since I had the game freeze up on me a couple times, blowing away my efforts since the mission's start.

The combat for the game promotes and advertises using cover, but it's very unclear what angles constitute cover. Some sort of indicator of amount of cover each team member is under would be very helpful. Without a way to rotate the view and level backgrounds that don't move translucent when you mouse over them, moving precisely can be difficult. Every now and then a piece of the level or a dead body prevented me from moving to the exact square I wanted. Couple this with the fact that you cannot undo any actions and there's no confirmation you're moving where you want and missteps in the game become critical.

The final point deals with AP and your enemies. Your units get 6-8 AP per turn. Using melee weapons cost 1-4AP. Using firearms cost typically 3, 4 or 6 AP. What this means is that the sniper you get, who starts with 6AP, can shoot OR move. Your other characters can move about 3 or 4 spaces, then shoot. By applying augmentations to units you can boost AP, but usually at a heavy cost to accuracy or some other stat. Very quickly it becomes clear that enemy units, regardless of what kind they are, have no such restrictions. Enemy units can approach you from 8 units away, take a shot for damage higher than anything your units can do (or take several shots), and then retreat the same distance again. It's the kind of action it would take my team several turns to accomplish, which makes them sitting ducks. True, I need to plan my actions more, but I must, inevitably, run up to an enemy and take damage, hoping they waste all their points shooting you instead of shooting you and moving out of range again. There's no leveling up for you characters, there's only a trade of boosting one stat for another… but more AP is useless without more accuracy and accuracy is useless if you don't have the AP to use it.

Part of why it's so frustrating to see your own units be so ineffectual is that the punk unit you just purchased for 200 gold is massively underpowered compared to the punk units you're fighting on the street. It's an odd disconnect.

However, as un-nuanced as the gameplay feels in Urban Legend, it's still entertaining enough to continue with. The game is extremely easy to play, partially because there's so little to it. Click a character to select it, click again to move them. Right click to shoot. The game, in the end, simply feels like it falls just short. It's well made, to a point. With a little more thought and balance added to the combat, this would be a knock-out title, but as is, it falls flat.

Graphics:
The pixel art in Urban Legend is well done. The sprites are clear and the colors are well done. However, things are very small. In the default settings, the font was difficult enough to read that I was forced to switch to a boosted resolution for the title.

Sound:
The music in the game is a very fitting hyper-kinetic style that makes it feel like you're playing a rave, which is pretty well suited to the personality of the game.

Gameplay:
All there is to Urban Legend is the combat, and that's not terribly well done. Cover is hard to determine, the map can be tricky to maneuver around in tight corners, and unit abilities seem to be woefully skewed between friend and foe. There's no ability to save intra-level and things can get pretty frustrating.

Concept:
It's a favorite genre of mine, so it's hard not to give points for the attempt. It's not as good as it could be, and it won't fool old pros at turn-based strategy, but it's still a decently put together title.

Value:
At 30 levels long, Urban Legend is a lot of game to digest. $20 is a pretty standard game price these days on the indie market and while the game lacks some features, it does not lack for amount of gameplay in the least.

Fun:
As much as enjoy the genre and the experience, I always ended up getting to a point where some enemy unit marches in from across the stage, hits me for 22 points of damage and then marches away, while I can only move a few spaces at a time and hope my shot hits someone.

Overall:
As the monthly panel proved, some people will out and out love this title, however, I just don't think it holds up to some of the game-standard in the genre.