Game Story & Features
The back story on Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom goes like this; you and two other members of an elite squad of warriors called Dragon’s shade are off fighting battles in the barbarian wastes in the name of King Halaskar. When the trio returns to their peaceful home land after years away they find that their county is changed into an evil place full of misery and suffering. To make matters worse, your own King Halaskar is rumored to be the cause of all the evil. Once the truth is known the only option is to kill the evil king and free the people you swore to protect. That’s the story in a nut shell.

Game play is third-person and you can choose from three characters, a mage, a warrior and a female scout. While all three characters have their own unique fighting style and moves, none of them change weapons throughout the game, which gets a bit boring. The characters are controlled by the controller stick and buttons, no use of the motion sensitive control aspect is made.

As you beat enemies you gain levels and points that you can apply to character attributes such as health, mana, attack power, magic power, melee defense, and spell defense. You also get a star with each level up that you can put towards your magic spells for any of the characters. I played the warrior most often and the stars went towards different attacks he could accomplish with his hammer. Each star made a given attack more powerful. As you fight slain foes will leave behind armor and orbs that recharge your health, magic mana, or essence (money in the game).

As you play though you come to portals that allow you to save your game and spend your mana updating your items, restoring your health and making new gear for your character. Occasionally you will come across gems locked in chests along your path or found that will give your weapon new abilities.

Actual fighting in the game is done via the quartet of familiar Playstation buttons on the controller. A small window in the bottom left corner of your screen helps you to figure out which combos you can pull off by tracking the buttons you have pushed. Pushing certain sequences allow you to pull off different moves, the more buttons required the stronger the attack and so on. The fighting becomes a mish mash of fast button presses before long and can be a bit tedious at time, but I rather enjoyed it. This game is hack and slash at is core with a few puzzles and some NPC characters to free and work with that you along the way, but the vast majority of the game is simply hacking up enemies.

Graphics & Online Play
There is a multiplayer portion to the game, that doesn’t seem to be one of the main aspects of the game. Up to four players can join online and play though the same campaign that you get offline. Any progress made in online mode doesn’t count towards you single player game.

I played the game on my Viewsonic N4251w 42 inch LCD HDTV and found the graphics to be quite good in my opinion. Graphics are nothing like what you get in say Oblivion on the PC at high resolutions, but I found the environments to be attractive and the characters to be fairly detailed. I wish when you equipped new armor on the character it changed the appearance more, but still graphics are pretty well done and look better for sure than what my PS2 looks like.

At the end of the day, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom doesn’t really make use of all the cool bits that the Ps3 brings to gamers but it is fun and has good graphics. If you are into hack and slash RPG titles Dark Kingdom is a game you would probably like to add to your library.