Battleheart Legacy, a Great Action RPG with Some Minor Flaws

Battleheart Legacy is a fun, action RPG, dungeon crawler, filled with campy humor, clean visuals, and interesting layers, but with some missed opportunities. 

Gameplay & Combat
As with many RPGs, you can customize your equipment layout in order to maximize your skill set, such as by equipping weapons and armor that raise intelligence for spell casting. You aren't forced to pick a specific class, such as rogue or bard, and can actually mix skills from various classes to make for interesting battle combinations. At first I dabbled in a variety of classes and skills, in order to feel them out. My focus eventually was on the ranger class, with supporting skills mainly from the bard (charm) and necromancer (skeleton minions). 

The battle system is seamless and easy to learn. Details like being able to queue up your next ability while your current ability is being initiated allows for a smooth combat experience. 

However, combat becomes quite repetitive after a while. At first, a new combination of skills and fighting new enemies makes for a dynamic battle, but once you settle into your favorite skills and have learned how enemies behave, the battles get stale and formulaic.

Progression
The biggest issue with this game is the lack of activity and content starting around level 18, which left me attempting dungeons prematurely and battling in the arena with little success. I found myself slowly grinding to gain experience, replaying previous dungeons or getting smashed in high level ones. And this process carried on until the very end of the game. With just a little more content sprinkled in from level 18-30 the game could be infinitely more enjoyable, as it would maintain the steady cadence that the first half of the game provides.

When you traverse the world map, you sometimes get drawn into random encounters. Unfortunately the enemies do not scale in terms of difficulty, so you will quickly be one-hitting baddies. Having scalable world map battles would also help solve for the lack of content in the latter half of the game that I mentioned above.

Story
There's not much story in this game; Don't expect to see a complex backstory to accompany our hero. In fact, don't expect any backstory, and don't expect him to be much of a hero either. There is some information here and there about the kingdom and history, but it's incredibly minimal. Overall, the major lack of story is a huge, missed opportunity.

The only character defining elements in this game are the moments when you have the option to be nice or mean, which can translate to a sassy response or killing a stranger begging for mercy.

Bugs & Suggestions

• The enemy and hero fire VFX and wolf look identical, so I often confused them (i.e. am I standing in enemy fire that hurt me or my fire that only hurts the enemy? Is that wolf my minion or an enemy?). It would be nice if, for example, my wolf was a different colored skin so that I could differentiate in chaotic battles.
  
• At one point I ran into an invisible enemy that couldn't be hurt and only attacked if targeted.
  
• In one dungeon I came across frozen enemies that didn't fight back.
  
• If you charm an enemy, then use intimidate, and your charmed guy gets intimidated. This could be considered by design, but feels unintentional.
  
• If you summon a pet while one is already out, sometimes a second pet will spawn, while other times the existing pet will be healed. I'm not sure which of the two scenarios was intended here, but I'm guessing the latter.
  
• Path finding is generally good, but I did notice a few objects that get in the way and I even got stuck behind a bush, forcing me to restart the game.
  

Summary
I really enjoyed this game, at least at first, and then I got frustrated when the content got thin and combat got stale. Overall, its an enjoyable title that's worth checking out, and I'm eagerly hoping for a sequel that leverages the structure that has been created here, but with more content and preferably some story as well.