Vampire Legacy is an RPG for those who love old school dungeon adventuring with a Facebook twist. Similar in inspiration to Playdom’s Deep Realms, Vampire Legacy by Sneaky Games offers combat, loot, experience, equipment, skills, levels, and a genuine tavern to get your drink on after a long day at battle. It feels very much like an evolutionary successor to some of the early energy driven “clickfest” RPGs such as Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars, bringing the game to life with animations and a more virtual world feel.
Vampire Legacy is an RPG for those who love old school dungeon adventuring with a Facebook twist. Similar in inspiration to Playdom’s Deep Realms, Vampire Legacy by Sneaky Games offers combat, loot, experience, equipment, skills, levels, and a genuine tavern to get your drink on after a long day at battle. It feels very much like an evolutionary successor to some of the early energy driven “clickfest” RPGs such as Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars, bringing the game to life with animations and a more virtual world feel.
Players start off in Vampire Legacy by customizing a character and learning a bit about the back story in the game. The lore isn’t overly complicated; in fact, it is quite cliche and rather generic. An evil vampire named Edmund has been allowed to roam the world at will, and now you are the brave adventurer who will be putting an end to his chaos. A vampire named Edmund sounds awfully similar to Edward from the popular Twilight series, but hey, we won’t judge. After a brief tutorial teaches you how to navigate the various interfaces in the game, you begin on a quest to reach level five by battling enemies out in the world.
The overworld map is a key element of Vampire Legacy, as this is where you traverse and explore to find enemies. Clicking on the different objectives will guide your avatar to those locations to take part in battles. Battles are straight forward turn-based combat encounters not unlike those found in Pokemon or other traditional Japanese RPGs. Defeating enemies will earn you experience, which in turn will level you up. With each level, you can put new points into various statistics such as physical, spirit, speed, and heart. You also are rewarded with training points that can be used to unlock new abilities, letting you customize which spells and combat maneuvers you choose to use in battle. Quests in Vampire Legacy guide you around the map, giving you objectives to seek out such as finding Huffy the Vampire Bunter or uncovering the story behind the bandits that are running rampant around the world.
Vampire Legacy poses its stories as conversations, allowing you to choose what responses your character says. This gives a deeper narrative to the game, however the choices do not seem to affect what happens within the game. Some of the choices allow you to roleplay as a snotty character or a kind and friendly character, yet the story ends up playing out the same way.
While Vampire Legacy feels solid in terms of gameplay, nothing about the experience made me want to continue playing beyond my first attempt. The user interface feels archaic and a little too plain and hard to read at times, with too many different fonts and little continuity between the windows in the game. The background art is rather beautiful, but the character animations, spells, abilities, and equipment are lackluster to say the least. The game feels like it was built in 1999 instead of a being a modern take of a favorite genre. Was Vampire Legacy an attempt to bring a more hardcore game to Facebook? Possibly, but the game doesn’t do anything innovative for the genre. I don’t see a reason why someone would choose to play Vampire Legacy on Facebook rather than playing one of the dozens of Flash games on Kongregate or elsewhere that have mimicked a deep RPG experience within the browser.
Vampire Legacy has a lot of potential and could evolve into something better if the developers work on the animations, the story, and clean up the interface to look more modern. The basic core of the game is pretty solid and may appeal to those looking to re-live the glory days of hardcore RPGs. It just doesn’t feel fresh and new enough to recommend for a playthrough at this time when there are so many fantastic and creative choices out there to choose from in the RPG space.
