Dungeon of Legends starts off with a cool premise; you are a mage (the game is never clear if you are but you look like one) and you have 75+ rooms to navigate and solve puzzles in. You have to avoid the skeletons and ghosts walking around and you can't attack, only jump. At first I thought it was a cool idea because there's no shortage of dungeon crawler games where you hack and slash Diablo style; this game however is all about the navigating and avoiding of fights.

While the premise is interesting the execution really lets the game down, many rooms involve jumping around on moving platforms to avoid floors filled with spikes, only the controls aren't up to the task as jumps are too floaty in what I suspect was an attempt to make controlling all this isometric platform jumping less punishing. Instead the floaty jump controls combined with the camera view make most rooms a chore as your character falls to her death over and over. I get that the jumping around segments are meant to be hard, otherwise there probably wouldn't be so many there to make getting around the rooms harder, but the virtual d-pad and floaty jumps are the true obstacles. There isn't any real consequence to falling besides starting the room again (at times this is more than enough punishment in itself) and the deaths being added to a tally in case you need a regular reminder of how many times you've floated right over yet another small moving platform.

Besides the controls the puzzles are also really lacking. To navigate most rooms you have to jump your way to levers or keys to open the exit, and then jump or avoid skeletons on the way there.

This isometric game looks good, the main character stands out as fairly detailed. The sound is also another standout, bar the scream when your mage goes falling to her death (you will hear this a lot). Hopefully the developers use these assets in a future game so they don't go to waste here. There is still a place in the app store for a game like this (maybe when iPhone controllers start being released).  

 

Conclusion

Dungeon of Legends is a game that had a good idea but was brought down by the limitations of touch screen controls and lack of difficulty to its puzzles. Understandably the iPhone is a difficult platform to have pin point accurate controls and mobile games aren't expected to be too deep when play time is shorter, but it's been long enough that developers can find alternative controls or ways to keep a game interesting.