Lakeburg Legacies Review (JD Linwood)
Repetitive steps, none of which are fun, make this game all chore and no pleasure.
I picked up Lakeburg Legacies because I thought that it would be a fantasy narrative-driven city-builder, perhaps similar to King of Dragon Pass.
It plays more like a mobile app game, where the player makes a few important decisions but many trivial ones. Those trivial decisions fall into two categories: 1) romancing and 2) task-assignment. Neither of these two aspects of gameplay is enjoyable, and the presence of each works as a detriment to the other. Like in a mobile game, gameplay is shallow, and largely works by tempting the player on a monotonous treadmill of minor achievements, not one of which really changes gameplay in any meaningful way.
Romancing is a necessary aspect of Lakeburg Legacies because finding love is an important part of meeting your citizens' needs, which keeps them happy. This is a fresh and fertile idea for gameplay, and Lakeburg Legacies sets up romance in the most boring and shallow of all possible ways. Every single time you hitch one of your villagers to a partner (either a fellow villager or an outsider), you play the same mini-game, which the game openly acknowledges is based on a dating app.
During dates, you have the choice either to answer a series of questions based on memorizing a brief list of your villager's date's likes and dislikes OR to skip right to marriage. Skipping the dating process has the twin disadvantages of being both costly and resulting in significantly less love between the newly-wed couple. Every single time, you'll want to answer the questions, and because you must complete this task literally hundreds of times across a full playthrough, you may find yourself cheating the way I did by taking a screenshot of the information, then using it to answer the questions. Every time, it's the same kind of information with identical scripts.
Task-assignment is a tried-and-true mechanism in strategy games. I love it: one of my favorite games of all time in Master of Orion II, which involves managing workers not just across industries and planets but sometimes even across star system, the player shipping them with fleets of shuttles. Despite task-assignment lying at the core of Lakeburg Legacies, the developers somehow managed to make it tedious, boring, and confusing. It's incredibly difficult to shuffle your villagers to the right tasks. I loved the concept of different villagers having strengths that may align with their personal preferences (just like real life!), but the game never made clear to me why I should care about a villager performing a task that that villager preferred. If a strategy game asks me to make a tradeoff (as all strategy games do), I should have some idea of what lies in both pans of the scales!
The most frustrating part of the game comes when hunting for the few rare villagers who are adept at Lakeburg's most pressing occupations, such as prankster, rat-catcher, and, of course monarch (you'll learn to appreciate your rat-catchers more than your weavers or bakers). With so much riding on keeping the best-qualified villagers completing these existential tasks, the game makes it incredibly difficult to find the best candidates, or even good candidates.
Romancing and task-assignment are far more antithetical than they are complementary. That's because the part of the game that works like a resource-management game encourages players to be rigorous, careful, and judicious, while the part of the game that works like a dating simulator and community-builder encourages players to be adventurous and daring. As a strategy gamer, I found myself devoting myself constantly to the same questions, even as the game seemed to be trying to tell me to just experiment and speed up the clock (which I never did, though I forced myself through over twenty hours of micromanaging gameplay for fear of seeing Lakeburg disintegrate for lack of qualified rat-catchers).
A final complaint: the presence of so many different menus, and of so many tasks and choices which it is possible to find in one of these menus, means that sometimes, the player will uninentionally miss easily-obtained bonuses and improvements. For instance, I somehow missed the ability to increase households' potential number of children, even though it would have substantially increased my town's population (and thus my town's final score). I also found it easy to find the option to have two villagers meet each other, but not the option to have one villager give a gift to that villager's spouse -- something which I repeatedly would have chosen, given its usefulness and its low cost!
I'm sure that, even after as long a playthrough as a typical Civilization III run, I missed something important in Lakeburg Legacies. But the truth is that I just don't care enough to open the game again to find out. I never want to play this game ever again, and I can't think of a single person to whom I'd recommend it.