Shalnor Legends: Sacred Lands Reviews

Game regulary crashes when playing. I am unable to find the reason it just seems like a timed crash. I am unable to play the game for any reasonable time, and has become quite frustrating. I do not recommend it.

It is a fun simply adventure/zelda style game. If it were not for the constant screen freezing i would say that it has a high replay value. Replay value is one of my main criteria of a good game.

Generally fun, cute little game IF you really enjoy games like 16-bit Zelda, A Link to the Past. The art style and general gameplay is clearly taken from Zelda, but much less fluid and dumbed down. The game has that Zelda charm, and that's why I continued to play. However...there are issues. First off, you must love grinding. Half the game play is simply grinding for gold and material items to make potions to upgrade your equipment. Gold does come pretty fast and furious, but the items are quite expensive to buy. Movement is extremely sluggish and the music is pretty bland and uninspiring. Very little combat needed outside of boss fights, which feel uninspired as well.

Shalnor Legends is a simple labour of love with classic Zelda-esque gameplay. It's got its ups, it's got its downs; it FEELS like an indie game. It took me years to finish it because I put it down and picked it up again much, much later. I like simplicity. When you pick up the game after not playing it for eight months, you don't have to redo everything just to remember what's going on. The game doesn't hold much surprise in terms of story, but it did well within its own limitations. Simplicity also suggests that a lot of excess weight was cut from the game, which may or may not be true. Upgrading everything (if everything is your goal) is an awful grind, but otherwise it can be a challenge. The hit detection is a bit janky. The game is a bit dated (and was retro when it launched, so still dated). Heroic Mode is for the crazies; base game grind for 100% was bad enough; I'm not going there. But I had fun. For ~$10, I think it's worth it. Part of that is indie support, but part of it is "$10 isn't unreasonable". While I won't be 100%ing the game, having fun was the goal and I definitely did that.

The game is easy to understand, gives a goal to push forward to and a reason why you need to do it.. yet it still allows for exploration and freedom of discovery. The puzzles are fun and challenging enough that it pushes to think and take a minute. The graphics remind of many games I grew up playing with a slight darkside feeling to them.. Overall I highly recommend it to others who would like to take on a challenge similar to ALLTP or the Original zelda while having merits of its own that makes it fun and unique.

Honestly I would only recommend it in a bundle deal on sale. I feel like this game has a lot of love but all puzzle/trap rooms feel the same (due to looks and reused timings even though layout is different), combat isn't exciting (bosses feel same except ghost boss), heroic mode should be available from the start and story isn't well build as a game story. And don't get me started at the grind... Like on paper this game should be good, bosses have different attacks, puzzles and traps have different layout, exploration with a day/night cycle, good story concept etc.

A modern representation of a Zelda-clone, and actually a good one. As expected the game is Action/Puzzle/Exploration in 2D with descent graphics/audio and very fluid gameplay. Game builds its mechanics through discovering secrets, and player evolves in a rewarding pace. Its areas are open to be explored as the player wants, and most upgrades require heavy grinding which can become repetitive. Other than that, the game offers a well presented world offering many good puzzles and bosses to treat the player. As it stands I recommend it for a full play-through as it connects with good memories and offers a solid RPG experience.

Shalnor Legends: Sacred Lands asks the question: "what if we removed all semblance of level design from The Legend of Zelda". Gone is the massive bag of tools to allow you to solve puzzles with a multitude of options. Instead the only upgrade you get is a bow, and a couple of various elemental arrows that have virtually no real difference between them from a gameplay standpoint. Puzzles in this game consist of extremely tediously designed trap filled hallways where like 75% of the floor consists of spikes, or you have roughly 20 (not a comical exaggeration for effect) sliding spike traps next to each other where you simply stutter step through a hallway over, and over again. More often than not, without an exit at the end of the task so you get to take your meager reward and stutter step your way back though the way you came for a double dose of tedium. The game even decides to make these traps do double damage halfway through the game for reasons beyond my comprehension. You are tasked with entering four dungeons and fighting a boss in each to claim the sacred emblem of mild importance so that all four can be combined to open an entrance to the final boss. Each dungeon has little story to it, and no boss stands out over others as being significant either from a gameplay or storytelling standpoint. Even the last boss is essentially treated as an afterthought. The dungeons themselves are all very small and essentially just consist of the same collection of the same traps you've been encountering since the beginning of the first cave but in mildly different locations. You will literally feel the apathy as you slog your way through each dungeon waiting hopefully for something to get better. The worst part, however, isn't even what I've already mentioned. The worst part, by far, is the grinding. In this Zelda-like there is no finding a stronger sword, or better armor in a chest in a dungeon. You upgrade in this game via a crafting system in which you pay X amount of gold, and a set of components. There's around ten or so upgrades to your armor, your sword, and your bracers. On top of that you also have to hunt down special merchants that only appear at night. On paper not a big deal. What makes it bad is everything is so expensive. You are CONSTANTLY running around simply to grind money. And even when you later unlock a method of getting money faster you still have to go hunt down components as at best you'll only be able to carry enough to maybe get two upgrades tops in one run before you have to fully resupply yourself. Nothing says puzzly fast paced Zelda action quite like entering and exiting the same cave 30 times in a row on the off chance the barrels in the room are going to give you the pittance of a single shard of beast pelt. I went from trying my best to do everything possible in the game, to just kinda wanting to rush through it to be done with it, to eventually just not caring anymore at all. I know the dev has a sequel planned, and I'm not naive enough to think my review is gonna matter at all to them in the grand scheme of things. But, if they are listening the one thing you must MUST do is make the world feel more alive. Make dungeons interesting. Make us want to see what the next dungeon is gonna be like. Have NPCs that talk about the lore of the various bosses. Give as a reason to care. About anything. Anything at all. There's potential here. As to if we'll ever realise it? Who knows.

Fun little rpg. The dev is great and cares about the game. I had an issue and they worked with me to get it fixed. A lot of devs will not do that.

The only reason I'm writing a review, and a negative one at least, is because the dev cares about this game a lot, so getting this opinion voiced might actually change something. As of right now, I cannot recommend this game wholeheartedly, and that's in spite of playing both normal and 'heroic' mode all the way up to the 'completionist' reward. It took me 16 hours to accomplish this feat, but honestly it shouldn't have taken more than 8 (5 for the initial playthrough and 3 for the replay in heroic mode). The gametime is inflated due to a SERIOUS issue with inventory and money management. It's perfectly natural in this sort of game to have your progress correlated with unlocks and upgrades to the amount of gold and stuff you can carry around with you, but in this case it's completely off balance. Instead of linear progression throughout the game, you spend the sheer majority of it hustling through with barely any upgrades, only 2 potions you can carry, and in heroic mode everything kills you in 2 hits (utterly terrible when going through a spike riddled maze without checkpoints). All of that is because you need 250+ coins for each upgrade or purchase (and there are A LOT), but enemies drop only one coin (if at all) and you don't get enough from barrels/plants either, even if you go in and out of rooms just to repeatedly smash the same chunk of barrels (you usually get between 10-20 coins for such an action). When you get to the final area of the map, right before the penultimate dungeon, if you've explored enough, you're very likely to unlock a (spoiler alert, I guess?) fishing mini-game that solves this problem by making it easy to get money from it. There's no 'selling' mechanism, so you literally just fish and get money from it, so problem solved, right? wrong! Now you want to upgrade everything to compensate for what you've been missing all along, but sadly you can only carry around 1000 coins (if you've upgraded your wallet, which you probably have by this point), and 10 of each crafting components required for the 30-something upgrades that you've been vying for all this time. Said components are ONLY dropped from barrels, plants and enemies, but not nearly as frequent as it should be (in heroic mode it's even worse). So you walk in and out of rooms to shoot barrels until you get enough for the next upgrade, then go to the fishing spot to get some cash for it, rinse and repeat. When you've done with this ordeal it's a cakewalk to finish the 2 dungeons you've got left, you can walk on spikes without any care in the world and heal the hp you've lost through killing enemies. The bosses die within moments from the start of the battle, without any strategy or planning required. I think it's even supposed to be this way, since you get the item you need to proceed before you fight the boss, so there's no need to fight them unprepared and underpowered. If you've made it this far, just know that you might disregard all I've just said, play the game 'the normal way', die a lot of frustrating deaths, acquire 5 or so upgrades, finish normal mode and go home. Still, there's a lot of potential within this game, and there's a lot of things it does absolutely right, but it's a few tweeks away from being there. It's a nice zelda clone overall, and I believe the dev really cares about it, so this review will probably change to a thumbs up in due time.