Lionheart takes place in an alternate timeline, wherein the Crusades ended with Richard the Lionhearted accidentally unleashing magic upon mankind. Spirits, demons and their ilk now roam the world, and someone has to clean up the mess. That’s where you enter the game, four hundred years after Richard committed his faux pas. As a direct descendant of Richard, it’s all up to you to set things straight. The problem is, you’re carrying around a mystical spirit guide, and having that guide around has led to you being ostracized by just about everyone in the world.

The foundation of Lionheart lies within the "specials" oriented character development system. The core of the system is like that of any other RPG, having you begin character design by choosing from one of four races (that’s all?) and rolling the dice. As is to be expected, each race has a unique affinity; some are good fighters, others good mages and others very charismatic. Once you’ve chosen the basic character stats, you can chose from up to two optional traits. These traits are basically skill modifiers that vary from a percentage increase when fighting with one-handed weapons to the ability to learn new skills faster. If the basic traits aren’t enough for you, the non-purebloods (non-human races) must choose a racial trait. Again, these work as special modifiers, such as the 10% movement speed bonus granted by the "Infernal Quickness" racial trait. Each racial trait also has a downside, especially in that most give away the fact that your character is non-human in origin, and thus has problems dealing with pureblood humans. To flesh out your character further, you’ll need to pick three skills, which relate to combat, thieving or magic. These skills will increase as your character levels up, as you’ll be given skill points to allocate to these increases. Every three levels after the second, your character will earn perks, which mostly relate to combat or magic. And last but not least, you get to choose a kindred spirit, a sort of spiritual helper who narrates the storyline to you, and give you tips for getting around in the world.

Once your character is created, it’s time to start roaming the world and figuring out what’s what. And here’s where the game heads down the slippery slope of mediocrity. You start off in the city of Barcelona, friendless and penniless. It’s up to you to roam around, speak with NPC’s and figure out what your place is in the grand scheme of things. Here’s where the first problem raises its ugly head as the NPC’s practically hand you everything on a silver platter. The NPC’s give you so much direction, quests become one mind-numbing romp after another. I’d like to thank Black Isle for removing any and all sense of mystery from the game, I really wasn’t in the mood to actually solve puzzles anyhow. The early quests are painfully simple, from smashing a few monsters to tracking down the various guild leaders, there’s really nothing interesting or challenging about them. As you roam about town, you can frequently walk into empty homes and find plenty of gold lying about, which makes no sense to me. After all, nobody trusts you because of your magical nature, yet the guards in town could care less if you just roll into somebody’s house, pick up some gold and stroll on out. This leads to another problem I have with the game system, the lockpicking skills. I made sure to trick out my character with lockpicking skills, which allowed me to open all sorts of treasure chests that just seemed to be lying about town, yet the same lockpick skills proved worthless against locked doors. After about ten minutes of trying to open every locked door in town, I realized that most doors were there just for decoration, and that I wasn’t meant to play the role of explorer in Barcelona. This limitation killed any sense of open-gameplay I thought the game might have.

At some point, you’re going to run into opposition, and at that point, you’ll realize that Lionheart really is just a dungeon crawl. Quests typically involve killing someone or something by roaming about a sewer, building or dungeon, and thus you find you’re playing a somewhat updated version of Diablo or Baldur’s Gate. And that wouldn’t be so bad if we hadn’t played those games a thousand times over already, and that Lionheart doesn’t bring enough unique gameplay to the table to make us want to play those dungeon hackers again. Combat is so basic: it’s just click, click and click some more until you or your target takes a permanent nap. After a few rounds of this combat, you’ll feel like a nice long nap yourself.

So let’s say you’re a big fan of dungeon crawlers and you’re still interested in Lionheart. I’m pretty sure the graphics will kill that interest pretty quickly. The entire game is played from a fixed ¾ isometric view that should make everything feel 3D, but instead it looks like cardboard cutouts moving about. Character sprites are particularly criminal, as they are incredibly tiny and lacking in detail. "Generic design" is the phrase of the day when it comes to these little buggers. And while at first glance you might be impressed with he environments, you’ll quickly come to find it’s all drawn from a common palette of textures and models. Take my favorite example: the blacksmith shop. As you walk up to it, you’ll be impressed by how the smoke pours out of the chimney and the steam issues forth from the front door. Impressed that is, until you watch the motion for a bit and realize it’s the same thing again and again, and even the wind doesn’t change its course. It’s the same thing with any fabrics, and is especially evident in ships’ sails, which never seem to stop blowing in the same direction.

The sounds are par for the course for a dungeon crawler, with swords clanging, monsters wailing and heroes shouting. Nothing original or impressive here, save the occasional cool spell effect. The soundtrack is nothing to cheer about either, since it’s just a series of short clips fed through continual loops.

While you’d hope that the gameplay would be enhanced by the availability of four-player online multiplayer through Gamespy, that’s just not the case. The multiplayer just takes the same dull gameplay and lets you team up with other players to fight your way through the tedium. And I’m really tired of the Gamespy application’s continual feeding of advertisements or its begging for you to upgrade to the paid version. If developers are going to cheap out on the multiplayer and make us use Gamespy, then they should be licensing a full version to bundle with their titles, or have Gamespy work on a "lite" version that isn’t such a beggar. But they need to stop throwing around the shareware version as a way of saving themselves the hassle of setting up game servers. The money they save by not having servers of their own should go into licensing Gamespy for the people who just shelled out $40 for a game. But enough of that rant, let me just say the multiplayer is as un-fun as the single player game. Once you’ve sunk a few hours into Lionheart, you’ll have had more than your share of its gameplay.

Lionheart has all the makings of a good idea, but not a good game. Borrowing the specials system from Fallout is a great way to boost the whole character creation experience, but the rest of the game is just a rehash of things we’ve seen a dozen times before. If you couple the generic gameplay with the so-so graphics and the "blah" music, you’ve got a game whose only saving grace is a great storyline. But a great story does not a great game make, and so I’d say this game should only be picked up by the most hardcore hack and slash gamer.

See more screens on the Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader media page