Ancestors Legacy is a Historical RTS game set in the middle ages between 10-12th century. As a huge RTS fan, it was basically irresistible for me to delve into it. So what does Ancestors Legacy does better than other RTS games, and where does it fall short? Lets find out.

Ancestors Legacy is a squad-based real time strategy game developed by Destructive Creations and published by 1C Company. The European history inspired title was released for Microsoft Windows via Steam on May 22nd, 2018.

ANCESTORS LEGACY

DETAILED REVIEW

Story & Narrative

 The Campaign of Ancestors Legacy comprises of short stories involving different nations and more often than not, it feels like that the devs are teaching you the strength and weaknesses of different nations. First you play as the vikings raiding and pillaging Saxon towns. The game then shifts it’s focus on Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Slavs one after the other. The story is nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done.

The narration in cinematic cut scenes is weak and lacks emotional impact. It feels as if the voice actors are just reading the lines one after another from a piece of paper. Whether the characters are expressing anger or feeling sad, it all ends up sounding the same. This is averted in the in-game dialogues which is overall pretty good in quality.

Gameplay & Mechanics

Anyone who has played at least one real time strategy game will feel right at home with Ancestors Legacy. The game is easy to learn and has the standard, yet streamlined RTS mechanics. Unlike other RTS titles where townhall provides villagers that can farm or cut wood or work in mines, Ancestors Legacy has you capture the village townhalls (of which several available on the map) and then capture people to work for you (similar to capture the flag). If the enemies captures the point before you do, then villagers will work for them. This mechanics works real well and is more fun than have everything automatically assigned to you. Each village has their own specialization. Some villages are good for food and wood while others specialize in metal mining and so forth. This system adds a sense of freedom and choice to the game. The main resources of game are food, wood and metal. They are used for feeding your town, construction and upgrading weapons and armor respectively.

The main base comprises of houses which increases troop population cap (up to 10). The gameplay outside combat involves constructing buildings (barracks, archery range and stables), recruiting melee units, archers and cavalry units. Then there are churches which give temporary buffs to units. The inclusion of hero units give buffs to allied troops and debuffs to enemy troops (e.g some heroes give moral boost to ally troops which increases their attack and damage, while some strike fear into enemy units which decreases morale, attacking speed and increases the damage they take). Now lets talk about veterancy level. The more your troops kills, the more high level they can reach. The way the healing system work in this game, only few games has done right. If the troops are injured and outside of the fight, you can click heal button and they will rest and start patching up. If some of your troops get killed, you can send the remaining squad to a nearby village townhall or main base so that they can reinforce and come back ready to fight.

When you are done with the campaign, you can opt to play skirmish mode and Multiplayer. In skirmish mode you battle with the AI. I must say AI is pretty decent. Every nation has their strength and weaknesses. Some nations has weak melee unit but has strong cavalry, and some have strong units overall, but are high level and very expensive.

I tired multiplayer but couldn’t find any match since game was not released, or there were no players available at the given time. Whatever the reason I’m certainly looking forward to play the multiplayer in the release build of Ancestors Legacy.

Visuals, Performance and Sound

Ancestors legacy is a beautiful game. The visual fidelity is impressive whether you are relentlessly murdering enemy troops or burning down a village. If you  zoom in the camera, the game goes into cinematic mode by removing the HUD entirely. Its very pleasing to watch large battles this way. The blood and corpse persistence times in the game is very long and if your PC can handle it, you can make the dead bodies pile up so much so that the maps feel like a brutal and bloody battle was fought there. The Weather effects are also top notch.

During dialogue sessions my game crashed a few times, probably because I was playing a pre-release build. Other than that, the game ran at a locked 60 fps on an i7 4790K paired with a 980Ti.

Sound is solid in this title, whether its the music, ambience or combat effects. Everything fits in well and succeeds in giving the player the much needed morale and satisfaction one would expect from such a title.

 VERDICT

Ancestors Legacy is a solid RTS that provides many hours of fun gameplay. The combat feels good and satisfying. Graphics are of high fidelity. Some minor bugs here and there but aside from that, this game has genuine potential. If we keep aside some of the minor issues,  Ancestors Legacy proves to be an enjoyable game overall.