Sword Coast Legends Review

For consoles though, you also get the ‘Rage of Demons’ campaign thrown in for free, but one area where the consoles are lacking is in mod support – there’s no custom modules or player created campaigns unfortunately.

Multiplayer:

Multiplayer is probably the strongest element of the game. Not only can the campaign be completed co-op (including public matchmaking), but there’s a really great adversarial mode, where 4 players gang up against 1, who plays as the dungeon master. This is where I’ve spent most of my time so far. The DM can set quests and the size of the adventure, and in-game, has control over a ‘threat’ pool to place monsters, traps and objects.

There’s also rooms that have access to specific formations which can be added and changed around. Given the dungeons are also randomly generated, there’s a near infinite replay value, and playing as either player or DM is fun, especially when there are a full 5 players. My one complaint is that as a DM it’s difficult to scale some encounters, with the game giving you little help as to the level or competency of your players.

Presentation:

Adding insult to the injury of load times, one of the most immediately apparent issues is that Sword Coast Legends just doesn’t look very good on console. The maps aren’t very big compared to some RPGs of old, the level of detail and texture quality is really disappointing, and the character models look cheap and animate worse. There’s none of the fabulous character, map or load screen art that would have accompanied a D&D game of yesteryear, and even the spell effects and lighting are, at best, mediocre by modern standards. What is therefore all the more frustrating is that console performance is spotty at best. Spell effects can frequently induce slowdown, whilst multiplayer frame-rates are even worse, especially if the DM wants to spawn in large numbers of low-level enemies.

Whilst the score, by industry veteran Inon Zur, is sweeping, epic, and one of the highlights of the entire game, the less said about the speech and sound effects the better. Much of the dialogue isn’t even voiced, and whilst that’s disappointing, the acting quality is so diabolical it almost makes you wish less of it was recorded.

Conclusion:

Sword Coast Legends has a lot of promise, and translates well to a controller, but unfortunately this is a port where performance has been totally forgotten about. With, hands down, the worst load times I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of gaming and a number of performance issues, Sword Coast Legends could only really be recommended to the very patient or those desperate to be (albeit pretty basic) a DM but don’t have a local group of players. Anyone else should wait for a patch.