New Legends First Impression

Justin Chin is famous for being the designer of Jedi Knight, although he will be the first to tell you that he does not share the credit alone for that game. Many others, including Ray Gresko - co-founder of Nihilistic - and many of the team members who left to join Chin at Infinite Machine, contributed substantially to the game as well. However, much of the focus on story, which was one of the best points of Jedi Knight, can be credited to Chin.

His next game is New Legends, the debut title from startup company Infinite Machine, which Chin co-founded with Che-yuan Wang, who was a programmer on Descent and Jedi Knight. With this game, Chin hopes to take the storytelling he started in Jedi Knight to the next level. He also hopes to expound on the melee combat that was in Jedi Knight courtesy of the lightsaber, and evolve that into a deeper and more rewarding melee combat model in New Legends. GameSpot was treated to an hour and a half demo of New Legends, and here is what we learned.

New Legends is an action game driven by plot and story that takes place in the near-future in China. Warlords have gained power and now rule the provinces of China. Your character Sun Soo, is the son of one such warlord. However, an evil warlord with territorial aspirations has decided to make China great again and launches an attack to conquer all the warlords and their provinces. One of the many to fall is Sun Soo's home province. This evil tyrant, named XaoGon, quickly consolidates power, and Sun Soo, imprisoned in a jail in Mongolia, must race back to free his home province and defeat the power-hungry XaoGon. Along the way, he will journey across fantastic locations in China, some culled from the real-world China and others derived from the fancy of the designers.

At each turn in his journey, Sun Soo will meet a great cast of characters, including half a dozen non-player characters who befriend and follow him, and a host of evil generals who oppose him. Among the friends you'll meet are a blue half demon named Boo, a wizened man with a sniper rifle named Zhang, and a girl who commands a 170 feet long dragon named Talos. The boss characters opposing you - think the dark jedi in Jedi Knight but much cooler - come from the five classic Chinese elements: earth, wind, fire, water, and metal (Chin says there is some debate as to what the final fifth element is in classic Chinese culture, but he has settled on metal). These elemental generals all have powers that come naturally from their affiliation with their element, such as flight for the air general or massive strength for the earth general.