Alright space junkies, it’s time to talk about Kalypso’s new sci-fi simulation, turn based, real time strategy game – Legends of Pegasus. After humanity is practically eradicated by an alien force, all but a hand full of ships and some colonists find themselves in a foreign star system. Earth is lost. You are put in charge of reestablishing the human race, spread to other planets, defend from assaulting aliens, and find revenge. This is the human faction’s goals.
Other than humans, there are two other playable alien races; the tech hungry X’or and the ancient Arthrox. There are campaigns for each of the three species as well as options to just skirmish in long, time consuming matches like any other popular turn based game. I enjoy the concepts of Legends of Pegasus; A space themed turn based game with RTS style fights sounds enjoyable, much like a Total War game, but in space instead. While I definitely like the concept of LoP, the execution didn’t come off as smoothly.
While I’m all for complexity in video games, I also want an explanation of that complexity. On top of that, I want a reward for understanding the meta and a payoff for the complexity. In Legends of Pegasus, I never felt that. While the tutorial or early missions spoon feed you simple tasks, I still don’t feel like I fully understand what I’m doing. I love when strategy games implement culture and people, which LoP does , but I didn’t fully understand the purpose of it, though I get that culture makes your people happy so you want to find that balance. In a game where you have to put hours into a single match or level, having a bunch of questions always makes me feel insecure about what I’m doing.
The 4x map navigation can be sluggish at times but once you get a hang of the shortcuts, navigation becomes much simpler. There is a lot going on with the screen and without fully understanding every button the game gives off the feeling of being overwhelming.
As a dedicated RTS player, I found the most fun to be in combat. While the battles did not require a large amount of micro, certain strategies were super effective vs. the AI. My main tactic was to get my entire fleet to focus fire certain ships and just have my own vessels move back when their shields got low to cycle back in when ready. In these types of games I usually find the infrastructure elements to be the most enjoyable, but in LoP that award goes to the combat.
On a technical level, I’ve run into a few snares as well. I’ve just randomly dropped from my game so many times and then had auto save issues on top of that; it’s rather frustrating. The combination of these two issues has made my ability to progress in the game far more difficult. Replaying through the first human level / tutorial gets frustrating after the second time.
In conclusion, I feel like Legends of Pegasus has a ton of potential but was either released too early or the game just wasn’t fully polished yet. I always want games to come out when they say they are but if a game has to be pushed back for quality control, I'm all for that. A bad launch can completely ruin a potentially good game. The foundation is there, I think it’s still possible that if some major updates were to occur soon that the game could be salvaged. As it stands though, the game is somewhat of a mess, though the developers are patching it and (hopefully) making it better.
