Earth and Legend

The possibilities of smartphone gaming are numerous and ever increasing. That black slab of screen that you slip so idly into your pocket every morning is a spectacular piece of technology, and it can do wondrous things with polygons and code.

But it can also do hurtful things. Dark things. Things that make you say, “this isn't very good.”

One of those things is Earth and Legend, a new 3D RPG from DVide Arts.

A confused, lonely, cumbersome mess of a game, Earth and Legend highlights one of the most important adages in smartphone game development. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

You start your adventure by choosing your gender, deciding between an amply bosomed wench or a rugged, warmongering chap. Once you've picked a sex and chosen one of the three skin types, you're dropped into a bleak village.

There's a war going on, and you intend to be part of it. Although quite where this war is happening isn't clear. The world you inhabit is almost empty. A few NPCs waddle around on infinite loops, spouting the same lines of dialogue.

Others give you quests, sending you off to collect items for them, or to level-up by killing specific beasts. The problem is, it's not clear where you're supposed to be going, and the NPCs have no desire to tell you, so you'll spend a good part of your first hour wandering around, aimlessly slashing your sword and cursing.

Once you find your way out of the village, you're presented with more vast empty spaces, peppered here and there with enclaves of things to kill. To attack, you mash the sword icon on the UI until the thing you want to die is dead. Or you are.

As the game progresses, you'll unlock other attacking options, like a bow and magic, all of which are controlled in the same screen-bashing way. It's a broken system that leaves you utterly disconnected from the fight.

The controls in the rest of the game don't fare much better, and you'll often find yourself bashing into walls, getting stuck on rocks, or accidentally opening the game's useless map. It feels like you're constantly hungover, bumbling around a world that hates you.

The game also offers a multiplayer component, which allows you and a friend to tackle the abject misery and emptiness together. Unsurprisingly, this co-op mode is plagued with the same sloppy mistakes as the single-player.

Earth and Legend is so hypnotically in the thrall of RPG convention that it lacks a single original bone in its body, whilst still managing to turn each of the tropes it slavishly replicates into another reason not to play.

Just because you can build a huge 3D world, doesn't mean that you should. Earth and Legend is a lonely, broken experience. It offers nothing new, save for the realisation that we all deserve better.