Ancestors Legacy is a squad-based strategy game developed by Destructive Creations. There are four playable nations: the Vikings, the Germans, the Slavs and the Anglo-Saxons. The campaign follows each of these nations trying to best each other in a sequence of chapters inspired by real-life history.
Each nation has different troop types and they all have different campaign mode commanders who are treated as a separate squad and all have unique abilities. For example, they might have the ability to improve your squad’s attacks for a small amount of time. Similar to this each of the different troop types also have unique skills corresponding to their troop type, Such as shield units being able to raise their shields when taking damage from archers but this coming at the cost of slower movement speed for the squad.
Resource management is a big part of Ancestors Legacy. There are three resource types: Wood, Food and Metal. Each mission utilizing these three resources starts off with a small amount of them however to get more you must defeat and capture villages. This means taking out the town hall by burning it down then standing next to it for a while with no enemy interference and them using them to gather your resources. Along with that, they can build archer towers and defenses to defend the base from oncoming attackers.
The gameplay, for the most part, is solid, revolving around the squad-based gameplay has its pros but it also comes with a few problems holding it back. First the good things, the game is very inviting to new players but it doesn’t dwell on tutorials to long, everything is explained in the Viking campaign that teaches all the basic mechanics of the game in a fun way. Every one of the Viking missions expands on the mechanic taught in the last one. Teaching you that you can stage ambushes by hiding in bushes and tall grass and then using that information against you. It shows you how to heal your squads and replenish them all leading to an excellent final mission using all of the mechanics that you have learned in a big battle.
This is the best part of Ancestors Legacy and after this, the other campaigns turn into doing a couple of side missions, such as rebuild your army or defend yourself and they end up with a similar big final battle to the Viking one.
While fun for a while, it gets boring pretty quickly and the game can’t keep the momentum going for long as it falls off after you do the second campaign.
Thankfully Ancestors Legacy does have an excellent multiplayer offering. Most of the multiplayer mode is just the big battle from the campaign however with two different real humans the game becomes much more enjoyable as you feel like you are waging war instead of one side continually attacking the other and slowly capturing all of their lands. Disappointed though (in no fault of the game itself) the online community is quite small and all of the players I matched with where many, many levels above me.
Interestingly, this is one of the few strategy games with controller support and it works fairly well. Everything was easily accessed using the menus witch while open slows down time for ease of use. Even though the controller controls are pretty good, I found myself having to use WASD instead of just my mouse, as navigating using the mouse alone is clunky and will often stop moving up the map at seemingly random times.
The art style is inspired by medieval time periods and all the models are 3D. From the sky, Ancestors Legacy looks rather nice and it is quite easy to tell who is who from the icons above each squads name. If you zoom in, however, a lot of the models are bland and pretty strange looking. Most of the villages look the same but there are a few landmarks in the campaign mode such as castles and cities. The game’s story is mainly told through cutscenes with some pretty laughable voice acting for some of the characters narrating the story.
The music is forgettable but it does the job well enough in the middle of a game, and music cues are used to notify the player about events elsewhere on the map.
All in all, Ancestors Legacy is quite fun to play for a few hours but couldn’t hold my attention long enough for me to recommend it at full price.
Ancestors Legacy is continually being updated with new content and there is some essence of a competitive scene here with tournaments and competitions hosted by Destructive Creations.