Turn Based Strategy titles are rare now days and usually are only delivered by small companies who throw a niche title or sequel to a previously popular game. What makes these games nice are the wide variety of settings from fantasy to World War 2 and Science Fiction. Elven Legacy is based in a fantasy world, if you couldn’t guess, and is the sequel to the great and often underappreciated Fantasy Wars.

In an epic quest to restore the glory of the Elven Empire in a world of magic, dragons and deadly combat. With a strong single player game, multiplayer component, level and campaign editor players should find hundreds of hours of satisfying gaming.


Gameplay is where turn based strategy titles live or die and Elven Legacy’s gameplay is good, but it is not great and that might disappoint die hard strategy fans. The game fails to provide enough information during fights on your units to make informed decisions on your attack plans. The few issues which bring the gameplay down still do not hurt the overall game for its fun addictive factor.

The poor tutorial is an experience of futility as it stumbles in any real attempt to teach you the game. It would be best just to figure out the game yourself if you’re a newbie to the turn based strategy genre of gaming and those who have seen a HEX board will easily walk into the gameplay. The challenging and rewarding aspect to the game comes from the strong gameplay which does not attempt to change anything, but in fact just provides you with a strong normal game. The units consist of the normal melee units, archers, catapults, cavalry and cool units like mages and dragons.

Difficulty wise the game ranges from medium to some insanely difficult maps which usually would frustrate me to no end, but I am happy to report that the game does not actually frustrate by beating you down into a humiliating puzzle of ooze but forces you to be a better player. Some of the overall difficulty comes from the games user interface which I do not like at all so the level of difficulty will certainly be affected by those who can either work with or muddle with the user interface.


Unlike most strategy titles, height plays a huge important role in everything you do in the game. Hills provide a slight defensive bonus and slow movement, towns and castles get a huge defensive bonus, forests work for some units and hinder others. Knowing how each unit works on certain terrain against other units and this makes you think out your movements and combat roles several moves ahead of time, just like chess. While this side of the strategy game is not perfect it works well.

As your units fight they will gain experience and level up just like a basic role playing game, with each level you get to choose perks to upgrade that unit. These perks include movement bonuses or attack bonuses and this allows you to tweak your units to match your gameplay style. This makes the game more fun than the average turn based strategy title or any strategy title. Mounted units can charge attacking units which can turn the tide of a fight, Dragons can use their wings to reduce the morale of the enemy and Mages can learn more powerful spells.

The games AI is brutally mean because when you make a mistake it will turn around and exploit your mistake and make you pay for your inattention over the 18 (actually its less because you cannot play them all during a single campaign) missions.


Elven Legacy’s game has some good graphics and overall level design. Bright colors, some nice models and animation make the game visually pleasing. While the overall graphics are nice, the user interface is not the best as it is a clunky mess which hampers actual gameplay by slowing you down.

Elven Legacy’s audio is barely passable as the music and sound effects just do a basic job and the voice acting is horrendous and brings down the games audio score drastically. It is still shocking today that with so many great examples of voice acting we see so many bad examples like Elven Legacy. Perhaps they will do a super patch like CD Projekt did for The Witcher, well I can hope can’t I?


If you have some friends who own Elven Legacy then this is a high value game with a ton of replay value, especially with the map editor which will allow for a whole new world of MODS for people to create and enjoy. Even the single player side of things adds much to the games value, but with the generally bland multiplayer and aggravating wacky story line it’s not a game for everyone.

Now, if you are a fan of turn based strategy gaming then this is the game for you, especially if you were a fan of Fantasy Wars. This is fun and it is even a better game than Fantasy Wars was so fans of Turn Based Strategy games should buy this, but if you are un-sure a game like this is something you will enjoy then wait for the demo or download the demo for Fantasy Wars and see if this type of game appeals to you.