Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

Somethings get better with age, like a nice bottle of red wine. Otherthings don't, like your ability to stay hard. Take Goldeneye 64: A game that was enjoyable in its hayday but ever since has slowly become as enjoyable as "ball-in-a-cup." I understand nostalgia, but making a FPS today with those controls would be like converting your manufacturing plants to produce trebuchets in the event of a World War 3. Which is what I find odd about Legened of Grimrock.

It's "Old-School." Any time I see that tagline smacked on the cover of a game my testicles start imitiating a can of worms and my hairy fingers start scratching my noggin. I wonder, in what apspect exactly makes Legend of Grimyballs just so old-school? Well, I don't pretend to be an expert of the dungeon crawler RPG genre but if I had to guess it would be the bloody, unintuitave controls you're forced to deal with the entire experience. I mean, haven't we invented a better way to control a character from the first-person perspective?

Your character (or should I say four characters) can't rotate its head, so you'll often be rotating its body on a 90 degree axis and sliding along the surface like a rook on a chessboard. If you're not moving you can hold in the right click and look around, sort of like what happens when your press the N64 bumper while playing Goldeneye 64... I assume this is what "old-school" dungeon crawlers used to play like (and why they ever had to is beyond me). Maybe it was a simple way for programmers to intergrate the FPS perspective with a point and click adventure. So much for binding a "use" key.

Maybe I'm missing the larger picture, which could easily be possible. More times than not I walk out of movie theaters without a clue about what happened plotwise.

Walking sticks are for people that can't walk, and talking walking sticks are for people that can't talk or walk.