Sword Coast Legends

The game was promised as a true D&D-Experience, which in fact it isn’t. The RPG-rules are changed in a casual way, so in the end SCL feels more like a dragon-age-experience within a nice D&D-setting. If you can accept that, the game offers a good story-campaign with party-based combat, which is fun. On top you can create your own dungeons and quests, and play it with friends, including one player as a dungeon-master. Sounds good, but the creative power of the editor is not that big as in the classic Neverwinter-Series.

If you don't expect the promised but mostly missing D&D rules, this can be a very entertaining RPG. Otherwise you will be disappointed. The editor is useless (for now).

Sword Coast Legend is a game that combines great story-telling with character development. The gameplay provides a good experience by customization but does not manage to keep the experience entirely fluid with consistent bugs and glitches which riddle the game.

Will be remembered for its potential, if at all. [Issue#168, p.98]

Considering its wallet-friendly $40 price point, Sword Coast Legends’s core campaign is easily good enough to warrant a recommendation — provided you’re content with a rather leisurely, low-stress stroll through the Forgotten Realms.

This is a great entry point if you’re looking to jump on the D&D bandwagon as it does a good job of easing the player into this deep and dense universe.

Sword Coast Legends offers up a solid version of Dungeons & Dragons, with a campaign and setting that were immediately appealing to me and plenty of user content already filling the community. This sort of content will be enormously valuable in giving Sword Coast Legends life beyond its campaign. However, limited tools hold this title back from greatness on the editing front, while its clear Diablo and Dragon Age influences may rub D&D purists the wrong way.

With a proper DM, Sword Coast Legends feels every bit like the pen and paper game come to life. On the other hand, running modules or playing through the 40-hour single player game makes it feel like more of a standard fare dungeon crawler than a Dungeons & Dragons game.

Sword Coast Legends is a comfortable return to the D&D rules and universe, but oversimplified combat and a repetitive feel to dungeons and quests keep this game from being great.

It's full of bright ideas, and had some amazing potential, but the unripe Dungeon Master Mode will need the community and some continued support from the developers to truly shine. What remains is a solid adventure, that could have been better, but it's still satisfying for rpg fans.

There’s so much missed potential here that it’s a bit frustrating. Game updates are coming so maybe one day...but not today.

Sword Coast Legends has some great ideas and a wonderful world to draw upon, but struggles to live up to its potential.

What could have been one of the greatest features to this game turns out to be one of its biggest weaknesses, the DM Mode.

Jack of all trades, master of none. In terms of characters and story, it’s not Baldur’s Gate. It’s not a proper construction set for DMs to make their own modules either. It doesn’t even adapt D&D rules properly. And if you simply want to kill monsters and collect loot with friends, any MMORPG will do just as well. [Issue#204, p.76]

Sword Coast Legends aimed very high and missed its mark by a long shot. While it might be a fun action-RPG set in Faerûn, it pales in comparison to any recent top-notch, kickstartered RPG releases. Hopefully, we'll see some improvements in the near future, but overall the game feels like a hastily done, half-finished experience.

The game seemingly had everything that was needed to bring back the glory of Forgotten Realms, but failed due to a shallow story, unimaginative quests and lack of identity. [13/2015, p.58]

In some sense, though Sword Coast Legends is no Baldur’s Gate or NWN or Icewind Dale, I appreciate what they’ve tried to do here, even if the outcome could use some help. To their credit, they say in interviews they’re going to stick with it and try and fix issues as they hear about them.

Indifference. You will feel absolutely nothing when playing Sword Coast Legends. There are a lot of elements that make a good RPG, but they do not meld into a coherent whole.

The core of Sword Coast Legends has potential. The single player story is fine, but not remarkable, and the capacity for multiplayer is welcome but ultimately disappointing.

Considering how much processing oomph it seems to need, Sword Coast Legends looks muddy and unremarkable. The world is easily forgotten. Sewers, woods, tumbledown buildings, castles and keeps--perhaps the game’s beauty is limited by the necessity to stick to reusable tilesets, or perhaps the lack of clarity is down to that 3D style.

I experienced a great deal of bugs in my time with Sword Coast Legends. Items would fail to be clickable, enemies would be invisible (and no, it wasn't a failed perception roll), it crashed to desktop a few times, and there's a widespread need for polish. A few more months on the anvil were clearly needed to hammer out the unfinished edges.

Sword Coast: Legends is a slight disappointment. Its combat system is too simple, and its story too typical. It's fun when you play with other players, but it's not sufficient.

Its overall graphics and presentation are rough around the corners, but it's an enjoyable experience if you can convince friends to join your party. But if you're a lifelong Dungeons & Dragons fan and expect Sword Coast Legends to be the classical D&D experience it claims to be, you'll need to look elsewhere.

In the noble attempt to resuscitate the original Dungeons and Dragons brand in a videogame, the developers really messed things up, as the gameplay is a mixed bag, and not all mechanics work as they should.

“They told me I would get a steak and I got a tuna sandwich. No matter how much I love eating tuna sandwich I want my damned steak.”

Dungeons & Dragons comeback is really disappointing: shallowness and excessive action don't do justice to the brand. Another wasted opportunity.

With boring combat and a limited custom campaign toolset, Sword Coast Legends fails to capture the spirit of a true pen and paper role-playing experience.

The great tragedy of Sword Coast Legends is that the last couple of years have all but paved the way for it to emerge as the best of the cRPG renaissance, but its dull cooldown-based combat, linear quests, and cookie-cutter user-made content ensure that it's likely to be among the first to be forgotten.

Sword Coast Legends is a disappointment. After a long wait for a decent cRPG in the Forgotten Realms universe we got a weak campaign and a mediocre technical side that wouldn't stand a chance when compared do Dragon Age: Origins. Interaction with the game world in poor and quickly the game becomes reliant on combat (which - after a few hours - is tiring). Sword Coast Legends can be recommended only to hardcore Forgotten Realms fans.

A straightforward cliché that feels out of place in the new wave of cRPGs.

Everything in Sword Coast Legends works as intended, but that only serves to highlight that the games that inspired it are still better. [Dec 2015, p.56]

Instead of being inspired by the groundbreaking work of modern classics like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: OS, Sword Coast Legends fumbles by trusting its gameplay mechanics to dumbed down hack & slash gameplay inspired by old MMOs.

Instead of the promised successor to the classic RPG with the editor we have tedious Diablo-clone with nice visuals and music, but also with disastrous voice-acting, an average story, dull fights and miserable AI. Although the editor is available, it is so limited it’s almost unusable.

Once there was a time when the sword coast was an El Dorado for roleplayers: Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale. As Sword Coast Legends sadly proves, these times are gone.

The campaign provided with the package, predictably for a title whose main focus is its editor, remains serviceable but fails to impress.

You won’t find the fast-paced action of Diablo, or the tactical challenge of Dragon Age: Origins or Pillars of Eternity. Whatever you are looking for, you will probably find it somewhere else in a better game that you already own.

Overall an immense disappointment.