From portable to next-gen console, Untold Legends seems to have gotten lost in translation...
Dark Kingdom puts you in the role of some hero guy working for some hero group with some cliche name that soon uncovers some cliche conspiracy that reveals that the king of your beloved cliche fantasy kingdom is a cliche power hungry bad guy. Pretty sweet story right? Right? ...
The core gameplay of all the other Untold Legends games stays the same. You pick a character class and you fight through hordes of baddies and collect loots. The combat system is still pretty deep and you can unlock lots of new moves and spells for your character. On the PSP, this worked great and was tons of fun, but there are a few problems in this PS3 entry to the series; One, there are 3 very bland character classes to choose from (slow melee, fast melee, spellcaster) as opposed to the other games' 4 cool and specialized character classes. Secondly, you'd expect a console game would have much more added to the formula from a portable game, but you'd be wrong to have such expectations in this case. You see, Untold Legends games dominate the handheld action RPG genre (since games in this genre are scarcely seen) but compared to other action RPGs on the consoles, Untold Legends will disappoint.
The multiplayer on the other hand is what makes this game great, the co-op is as it always has been, where this game shines.
The graphics in Dark Kingdom are its only great quality. The lighting/reflections are great and the enviornments are pretty open and are detailed and no matter how many enemies are on screen, the game never slows down. But this game has artistical design from hell. The models look terrible because they are cartoony and way too out of proportion compared to the more realistic enviornments. But the best thing about the graphics is the capes, these capes are the best capes I've ever seen.
The music is the only part of this game that matches the "epic" feel the developers were attempting of achieving. But the awful voice-overs and often muffled sound effects aren't so great.
If you find any reason to go forth and beat the singleplayer, I'll be surprised. But the multiplayer is well worth playing and the character classes (though bland) are fun to try out for a little while anyway.
If you're a fan of Untold Legends games or RPGs or just video games in general, you'll probably be pretty disappointed with everything in this game except 4 things; the music, the combat system, the multiplayer and the graphics, but even then they all have flaws.