Developed By: 1C Company
Puslished by: Paradox Interactive
Release Date: December 2009
ESRB Rated: Teen
Available on: PC
Single and Multiplayer game play
Strengths: Nice graphics and magical effects, fun campaign
Weaknesses: Nobody on multiplayer servers, tough game play
Moral Warnings: Magic use, female warriors have revealing armour

System requirements
• Elven Legacy
• System: Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7
• Processor: 1.5 GHz Pentium IV; AMD 2000+ 1,5Ghz (Single Core)
• RAM: 512 MB
• Graphics card: nVidia GF FX 5700 or ATI Radeon 9600 128 MB
• Sound card: DirectX-compatible
• Hard drive: 3 GB of free space
• DirectX 9.0c Thank you GamersGate for sending us this game to review! Elven Legacy: Magic is the final expansion for Elven Legacy that adds fifteen new missions, new units, maps, spells, and a new hero. Though it\'s not required, I recommend playing the previous expansions before this one. This expansion starts off with mages becoming insane since the death of Farrakh. In response, the Holy Inquisition tries to intervene by destroying magic altogether. The Archmage supreme Alfred Brennock must travel to another world to restore magic and conquer evil; he isn’t alone in this battle. Just like Elven Legacy, the Magic expansion is still a turn based strategy game with RPG elements. Your army will consist of heroes, knights, archers, fencers, deer riders, dragons, air ships, orcs, elves with spears and big axes, and more. If you can keep your units alive long enough, they will level up, and if they die...all that experience will be gone. If the main hero dies, your mission will fail. If a not so important hero dies, they will be available in your next mission. When a unit levels up, you can choose some new skills/spells for them to learn. These new skills will usually increase attributes like defense, armor, or there may be a trade off for a new ability like invisibility, healing, or allowing you to cross terrain that was previously inaccessible. You move your characters in a hex-based pattern. Only one unit can occupy a hex space at a time. How many spaces, and how you can move them, varies by character. A unit typically has one movement and one attack per turn but some units can move a couple of times. There\'s a lot of strategy in unit placement; don\'t leave a unit unprotected, and if you do keep units together, they will attack whomever is attacking the unit next to them (basically a free attack for you). Each mission will have an area or a destination that you are heading towards. There are three victory modes: gold, silver and bronze. Each mode is determined by how many turns you take. The better the trophy, the more gold you will get. Gold is used to buy more troops, and you\'ll need them! You can also earn gold and possible recruits if you take over villages. Once you capture a village you can deploy your reserve units there. Before beginning a mission you can choose your difficulty level (Easy, Medium, Hard). I found Easy to be very challenging, so I can\'t imagine what the other modes are like. When a mission starts you have to deploy your units and then click that you\'re ready. Enemies are typically visible where you spawn. Sometimes you can sneak past and avoid unnecessary combat. There is a fog of war so you will not see the hordes of enemies waiting for you. You will see an arrow pointing at your objective/destination. Enemies tend to be in groups and after defeating an army many of your units can rest to heal, but this will cost a turn. They can only rest if there are no enemies nearby. I often found that after defeating a wave of enemies that there are more lurking just out of your line of vision. Although there is multiplayer support, I did not see any active servers to join. There is a map editor available for those who are into that. The graphics in this game haven’t changed and are still very detailed, colorful, and very pretty. The landscapes vary from green plains to snowy mountains. The enemy units are all nicely detailed and animate really nicely. Each unit typically represents an army. Sometimes battles will show two units fighting and other times it will zoom in and you can see the many units attacking each other close up. The enemies will vary as much as your army. You\'ll fight dragons, orcs, ogres, elves, hexers, and various animals and beasts. The magic spells are very drawn out and fun to watch. There\'s plenty of eye candy to be seen here. The sound effects are fitting, as you\'ll hear battle groans, screams, and weapons clanging. The background music is the same and is pleasant to listen to. My biggest complaint with this expansion is that they didn’t add any voice narration like the original game. This expansion could have been much more immersive with some voices to go along with the hero conversations or story narration. When it comes to appropriateness, there are battles, violence, and magic is used. All of which are pretty unavoidable. The battle sequences aren\'t gory; you\'ll see units attacking and reacting but it isn\'t a blood bath. Some of the female characters are lacking armor to protect their stomach; the males are, as usual, fully armored. This expansion had some bugs worth mentioning. You have four heroes on the final mission and you have to deploy all of them (and keep them alive!). When I had all of my heroes deployed the game didn’t let me continue because it kept saying to deploy all of my heroes. I eventually got through this by having all of my heroes and battle priests deployed. The expansion pack sells for $10 on GamersGate and is a good value given the amount of extended play time you’ll get. It’s still a very challenging strategy game and I entered a lot of cheat codes to give myself more gold and health. This expansion could have been so much better with voice acting and more beta testing. The missions are fun but the lack of multiplayer servers is a downer too. The single player campaign is great and I enjoyed playing as the dwarves, orcs, Brennock’s army, and even the demonic army of Farrakh. With the unique campaigns I feel that this is my favorite expansion and a good way to end the series.

Final Score Game Play 15/20
Graphics 9/10
Sound 6/10
Controls 4/5
Stability 3/5
Game Score: 37/50   72% Appropriateness 37.5/50   73%
-3 for violence
-3.5 for revealing clothing
-3 for magic
-3 for occult references (hexers)