For fans of hack-n-slash action RPG's or those looking for cooperative play, it's a decent option for the PS3.
With that context, describing how Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom relates to these past forays into the action RPG genre is easier through describing their differences:
- You have only three characters to choose from. This is the weakest selection of characters since the first Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and it limits replayability, especially if you got to see two of the characters through coop play the first time through. You can change their main clothing color, but it's a very small cosmetic difference.
- Melee combat is a definite step up. There are two melee attacks per character (X and square), and you can execute combos for various special kinds of damaging attacks like area stunning or knock-back. It reminds me largely of Kya: Dark Lineage, and adds some needed variety and satisfying wallops to the melee combat.
- No bows or crossbows. Only one of three characters has a ranged attack as a "normal" (non-magic) attack, and the other two are close-range only.
- No more recall potions or gate scrolls. Instead, you simply shop at any save point. The game calls money "essence" and you use essence to "create" armor, but other than the naming it's the same thing.
- You can't buy weapons. Instead, you add runes and gems to your existing weapon to add special effects like fire damage and critical hit. There are a few other non-damage kinds of magic enhancements your character can receive through this weapon modification approach as well. Strangely, this does change your weapon's appearance, though, which makes it again more of a semantic tradeoff than a true limitation.
- No more potions. Instead, killing creatures sometimes releases health- or magic- increasing orbs. This in general works fine during most of the game. During boss battles, though, there's no way to "stock up" on health or magic potions. While one might consider this a valid game design choice, since two of the three characters must use magic for their ranged attacks, it can be a little too limiting at times.
Overall, if you liked Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath, you'll like this as well. The length is similar, the graphics are rather better as it's on a more powerful console, the cooperative mode is just as much fun, and there is nothing that should be a big discouragement.
However, the game is not without its flaws.
The most major one is that leveling up your characters occurs at too rapid a pace. The max level is 45, but if you kill every creature (and respawning sections are minimal, so I'm not taking into account power-leveling here), you'll hit that about three-fourths of the way through the game. It detracts greatly from the enjoyment if there's no reason to hunt down creatures anymore, and turns the end section of the game into a boring dash to the last bosses. Plus, there's no harder difficulty level where you can pick up with your previous character and continue enhancing them, so it even further limits replayability.
There's an even bigger flaw associated with this previous one -- every time you level up, it resets your health and magic back to full strength. Fine. But if you've hit level 45, EVERY CREATURE you kill causes this same leveling up behavior. So not only is it pointless to kill more creatures after level 45, it's also trivially easy since you never have your health drop very far. Unfortunately, it makes the later boss battles where there are no minor enemies relatively that much harder, since you lose that auto magic/health replenishment.
Other annoyances: getting gold ("essence") is too easy, and the variety of armor too slim, so you'll always be able to afford the latest armor available as the store, leaving you nothing to wish for. The collision detection for the monsters is buggy, so often when you strike them you have to wait for them to fall fifty feet through solid floor then get reset back on solid ground before you can hit them again. And the coop camera control is lacking -- in single player mode you can choose up-close or far-away, but with two players it's stuck about halfway in between, sometimes preventing you from getting a good birds eye view of the action since you can't back out the camera to its farther single-player setting.
None of these should keep you from playing the game if you enjoy a good cooperative hack-n-slash action RPG. It's pretty, the game is still mostly fun, and as the price has now fallen to the point where it's one of the most affordable PS3 games, it's hard to discourage a purchase at a bargain price. But due to the limited replayability, you might get more distance from your dollar by renting it.