Rarely do games jump from the handheld to the console. Perhaps this is a good thing as Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom seems to illustrate. The essence of Untold Legends Dark Kingdom is the age old hack and slash adventure. But, unfortunately Dark Kingdom adds a few things that not only hurt the game as a whole but seem to have been badly implemented.

The story tied to Dark Kingdom is that you are a member of an Elite group called the Dragon's Shade who fight for the King by quelling uprisings of Barbarian Hordes. The story is set in a sword and sorcery realm of Dureth. You find out upon returning from a number of such battles that the King has taken up with Sorceress and is killing off his people or turning them into demons in order to become more powerful. You decide to stop the King and avenge the death of your friend. You can choose from three different characters to play through the game as: the Scout, the Warrior, or the Wizard. All three have slightly different stories and can be played a little differently. But the similarities between the three end up making the actual choice of character little more than aesthetic at worst and only slightly important at best. The areas you play in are pretty ordinary. You spend far too much time fighting in the typical cave level and lava-type level. Possibly the downloadable content will be a snow level.

The main problems in Untold Legends center around all the bugs that exist in the game and the need to make use of actions that cause those bugs. This hack and slasher wants to be a platformer, like Ratchet and Clank or something. Problem is that many times when you try and jump you just hang in the air slightly above where you jumped from for about 10 seconds. It isn't impossible to get through these areas but it certainly makes it a lot more frustrating. Another problem is the tendency for enemies to just pop into the area. With the wacky camera you can enter and area and begin fighting only to start getting hit from enemies off screen or turn into enemies that just appear behind you.

The game looks pretty good even with the unimpressive backgrounds and the lack of physics on some obvious items. The character models themselves are very detailed for hack and slash characters and it is impressive that the armor pieces you are wearing in the gameplay areas show up in the cinematics in the game. Many of the spell effects also look good and some of the weapon effects like lightning or fire actual look pretty good. Even with all these concession type graphics, the loading times are awful and during some large spell effects or combos the action slows to a crawl for a few seconds. Considering the power of the PS3 it is hard to understand where these problems come from except either sloppy coding or sloppy compression with considering the size of Blu-ray disc and the size of this game it shouldn't have been an issue.

There is no way to change weapons in the game. You have the weapons you start with throughout the game. The colors or styles of the weapons changes when you add jewels or runes to the five slots open for them. You can buy or find armor which has different effects in battle. Some of these effects are cool and some of armors themselves also look cool. It might have been a good idea in theory to streamline the collecting system so that inventory management would be easier. But the sheer lack of diversity makes the game less replayable and less interesting.

The game seems to use cinematics much too often and has a tendency of simply showing you the layout of a level rather than anything very useful or story line. The use of cinematics as whole is under used. They could have had a pretty good story rather than the very shallow one the game stuck with.

The game also falls short in the area of online play. It is unreasonably difficult to join or even host an online game and the fact that you cannot use the character you made in the single player to co-op or even the use save you have from the single player makes the online useless. You can, however, play on the same console multiplayer and use a previous save which is cool.

The soundtrack of the game is excellent and some of voice acting is comical but none of it really produces the serious reaction that it is trying to evoke. The sound effects however, are pretty bad for the most part, huge monsters sound just like little ones. The other effects are very arcade-like and have a tendency to make the player want to turn off the volume all together.

According to what I've heard there are hooks in place for downloadable content and the developers themselves have stated that there is everything from new weapons to new modes and levels on the horizon. This content and perhaps a patch can't come too soon to save this lackluster title. The game is moderately enjoyable but with all the problems it is good for SOE that Untold Legends is the only game of it's kind on the PS3.

Rating: 7.5/10 (Will update review as content is provided..)