Interplay's Black Isle Studios division is one of the best things ever to happen to computer role-playing games. Many of the best RPGs from the last five or six years have been Black Isle games: Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale are all part of this brand. Considering that amazing track record, it's easy to get excited about Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, Black Isle's latest RPG. Unfortunately, while it does bear some similarities to earlier games from Black Isle, it's generally just not as good. It's primarily a hack-and-slash game, but the combat tends to be unsatisfying, the production values seem dated, the difficulty is uneven and sometimes excessive, and the original alternate-history setting isn't enough to compensate. Even so, the game has some merits, and it can be entertaining for Black Isle fans who don't go in expecting too much.

Lionheart has a unique setting, and that's definitely the best thing about it.

Up till Lionheart, all previous Black Isle games had been developed either internally at Interplay or by Canadian developer BioWare, which created the Baldur's Gate series. Lionheart is instead the work of Reflexive Entertainment, whose credits include 2001's Zax: The Alien Hunter and Star Trek Away Team, as well as a couple of great shareware games, Ricochet and Crimsonland. Not that a company's past achievements are necessarily determinative of its future potential, but Reflexive's past focus on relatively simple, action-oriented games does come across in Lionheart. At first, this game has all the trappings of a complex RPG, including an open-ended character-creation system lifted directly from the Fallout series, dialogue with non-player characters, lots of side quests, and more. However, soon enough, the gameplay of Lionheart becomes a Diablo-style dungeon crawl, in which your lone character will inch his or her way through various enemy-infested areas, cutting down countless forgettable foes.

Lionheart isn't the first RPG to feature an alternate-history setting, but it still deserves credit for trying to do something different. According to the game's fiction, Richard the Lionheart's 12th-century Crusades resulted in a cataclysmic supernatural event called the disjunction, sort of a Pandora's-box-opening style of event that unleashed all sorts of magic and evil into the world. The game takes place in the 16th century in the wake of the disjunction, but despite the unusual setting and the presence of some historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Nostradamus, Lionheart basically tells your average RPG story, in which your character is a reluctant hero destined to thwart a great evil.

When you first begin, you can either choose from a number of pregenerated characters or create a custom character using the SPECIAL system (named after its seven core character attributes: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck), first seen in 1997's Fallout. You don't just choose to play as a fighter, a magic user, or a thief here--using this system, you define your character's core attributes and choose which skills he or she will excel at, so you have a lot of freedom in developing your persona. In practice, though, Lionheart all but forces you to play as some sort of combat-oriented character. You'll visit some towns and talk with some of the locals, but more often than not, you'll be out in the wilderness, all by yourself, fighting lots of monsters. To do so effectively, you'll want a character who's exceptionally good with weapons and magic--preferably both and not just one or the other. So, the open-ended character-development system is really more of a guessing game. Are you sure you chose all the "right" skills? Restarting as a new type of character can be a fun and rewarding part of an RPG, but in Lionheart, you might feel forced to.

Combat is the focus of the gameplay, but it's awkward and can be very difficult.

Regardless of your character, the combat's definitely got some problems. The action feels hectic and jerky, and it mostly just involves you left-clicking on enemies to auto-attack them with your weapons and right-clicking on enemies to cast spells on them. Most enemies rush straight at you, fast, and the speed of the game isn't adjustable, so you'll often find yourself desperately trying to click on the moving targets to gain the initiative. Once one enemy falls dead, you'll need to quickly click on another. You can pause the action, and while you can't target foes or issue move orders in this state, you can quaff as many healing potions as you need to when the action's stopped. With all that said, aside from it being repetitive and not particularly interesting, the combat's biggest problem is its difficulty. Some of the battles in Lionheart are flat-out punishing, and in them, you'll just keep dying and dying until you luck out and land a series of critical hits, or something. At least the loading times after death are brief.

Also, the game is locked at 800x600 resolution, which considerably limits your field of vision and makes ranged attacks less effective than they ought to be, since you'll typically be able to fire off just one or two arrows or spells before your enemy is upon you. An interface bar hogs the bottom third of the screen, so situations when enemies are approaching from either the top or bottom of the screen can be particularly annoying, though at least there's an option to minimize the bar. The limited resolution also forces you to constantly scroll the screen as you click to move your character--there's an option to leave the screen centered on your character at all times, but due to the low visibility, it's useless. The interface has a few other issues, such as the fact that your auto-map of each area cannot be annotated.