Those battles are monstrously rough, however. The AI is fairly good at exploiting weak spots and attacking weakened units which are on the verge of death but the design itself assumes you are the Elven Legacy version of Patton because it throws wave after wave of bad guys at you. I’ve been playing these types of games for well over a decade and I had to resort to playing on the Easy level, which seemed about right from a challenge perspective. It’s a brutally tough game.

The AI is tough and makes for a seriously challenging game but it would be nice if more info was presented to you while a battle is raging. There's no visual identifier as to how many points of strength a unit takes after a scrum or even if a unit dies -- you need to keep track of this yourself. Even as spells start flying around the field it's tough to figure out who is doing what and the camera tends to zip around making it even more confusing. When a high rank unit dies I’d like to know aside from realizing, "Hey where'd my archers go?"

Multiplayer is fairly bare boned – you can choose race but not specific units (buying units would seem like a no brainer, right?) and while hot seat, LAN and Internet are supported finding a game is tough unless you have players already lined up.

Fact is, Elven Legacy doesn’t push any envelopes or try to add some fancy new twist to the genre. It’s generic in almost every conceivable way. But it still has the ability to get its hooks in you and when it does you’ll end up like me – laughing at the dialogue, cursing the difficulty and fully realizing that it isn’t doing a whole lot different from the many turn based strategy games that have come before it…but you then notice it’s 2 A.M. and you’ve been at it for hours. Is that a testament to Elven Legacy or to the design that it’s borrowed from other games? Does that even matter?

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .