Legacy of Evil - Review (PC)

An arcade style shoot-em up with a slick 90's style and great gameplay

Legacy of Evil is an arcade style action/shoot-em up developed by Uruca Game Studio.

In Legacy of Evil you play as a party adventurers going through fantasy worlds to defeat evil. Although your characters are all on foot, it plays like an old school shoot em-up - you can only move left and right, and the screen keeps scrolling upwards.

You start off with only one option as your champion, but more unlock as you play through the game. Your first guy swings a sword as an attack, but you can unlock mages, archers, and more all of which attack differently. The unique mechanic that Legacy of Evil employs is it’s party system, and it’s one that I really found compelling.

As you’re going through the level, you’ll see other adventurers on the ground, passed out. If you touch them, they get added to your party, and start walking the stage with you. When you attack, they attack at the same time. Essentially, they act like a power-up. You can have up to five members of your party, so depending on your strategy you might want to get more ranged attackers, or melee.

In addition to these characters bulking up your party, you can also adjust your formation. You can have your characters in a line either horizontally or vertically, or a diamond position. The line formations are useful for avoiding certain obstacles, whilst the diamond position is generally the best one most of the time.

Finally, these party members also act as your health. Getting hit, takes one away. So you can effectively be hit up to five times if you have a full party before you die - unless you pick up more in-between. This creates a direct correlation between health and attack power - if you get hurt quite a bit you lose your party, and are therefore much weaker as you’ll only have one attack. It’s a system that can see you go from demolishing enemies to scrambling for survival in a few moments, and it’s quite exciting to play.

The champion you pick influences which ultimate attack you have, which ranges from a big sword sweeping the screen to a massive blast of energy amongst other things. A nice little touch is that at the bottom of the screen there is a slider which shows how far through the stage you are at - helpful if you are nearly dead to give you some motivation that you’re not too far from the end of the stage.

This is, a very difficult game. It’s set up like a shoot-em up - and that comes with all the difficulties of those games. Enemies can cut in behind you, and you can only attack forward. The bosses in particular act like bullet-hell games, with projectiles all over the screen. Bosses can be really hard, because you need to avoid the projectiles - but having a big party makes it more difficult. If you slim down, you can avoid the projectiles better, but you’ll do less damage and be more vulnerable overall. It sets up for some very intense battles.

There are also some roguelike elements in the game, if you die you can use the gold you’ve gathered to get upgrades at the shop. These can strengthen your characters or increase the likelihood of various useful drops in the levels, which have effects such as increasing your speed or attack power. This works, but I think the amount of gold to get these upgrades is quite high, and I think it would take quite a bit of grinding to actually buy them all, which doesn’t quite mesh with the shoot-em up genre.

The graphics, are straight up 90’s arcade and they look great. They committed to them, and in particular the bosses look awesome - massive sprites with good levels of animation, and the enemies in general are quite varied. I really like the look of this game, but of course that is just my opinion, you’ll have to judge for yourselves if you like the style. The music too, is great and fits well.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing Legacy of Evil. It’s tough as nails and very difficult - and you’ll need a controller to play it - but it’s fun to play something that actually feels like an arcade game, where dying constantly was expected. Arcade games didn’t take prisoners, they wanted to steal your pennies - and neither does Legacy of Evil. The mechanics are fun, and the graphics are great - this is one I can recommend easily.

Rating - 4/5

Legacy of Evil is set to release on Steam in July 2025, at a price of around eight dollars.