Even though Black Legend uses a lot of common features, they are blended in an original way. With the addition of alchemy, battling never gets boring, even when it takes hours of gameplay to be proficient in it. The background folklore offers ingenious classes and enemies, as well as a solid basis for the visual style. Players would do well to avoid the madness-inducing fog trying to make them overlook this game.

Black Legend might not be an unmissable game, but it's still one that fans of strategy RPGs should definitely have on their radar.

Black Legend features some outstanding gameplay elements that can make its battles extremely rewarding. On the other hand, its underwhelming and monotonous game world combines with oodles of technical issues to hold it back from greatness.

Black Legend certainly starts from an interesting idea. The problem is that it remains an idea.

Black Legend feels and looks like it could be at least ten years older than it is. The environments are all nearly identical, almost every attack has the same animation no matter how it’s actually described in the tooltip, the only tutorial is a 15-page menu you read at the start, and there’s an entire adrenaline system that I’m pretty sure is never explained anywhere. To say the game is unpolished would be generous, but I can’t lie, I really liked it. It apes Bloodborne’s atmosphere all the way down to NPCs you can talk to by knocking on doors that have a light on, and I have to admit I’m a total sucker for it. I loved coming up with ways to build a well-rounded party, even if it felt like I could probably breeze through combat without trying nearly as hard as I did. I’m the same guy that put 40 hours into Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics and loved every second of it, and I know I’m not the only one. If you’ve got the same passion for old-school tactics games, and I mean that in every sense of the word, Black Legend is just as infectious as the classics. It’s not for everyone, but the things it does well, it does really well.

Black Legend is an interesting experiment for the strategy genre. Unfortunately, because of the game's pace and technical issues, it isn't a completely successful one. There are battles and aesthetic moments that make Black Legend feel rewarding, but those moments are often overshadowed by glitches and the frustratingly slow combat, which is a huge detriment to a gameplay-focused experience. It's definitely unique in its genre and might be worth checking out if it gets patched or someone has a lot of spare time, but overall, Black Legend is too often submerged in the mire of its core issues to give itself any chance of shining the way it could.

What’s good about Black Legend is very good. The gloomy atmosphere and the novel turn-based combat based on 17th century medicine are well designed and smartly implemented. Everything else about this game is either bland, rough around the edges or straight up poor. Diehard fans of turn based strategy games that can overlook the issues will still get something from Black Legend. For everyone else, there are better alternatives.