Here’s another of those games I never would’ve tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass. But it was and I needed one more Game Pass game to collect my Microsoft Rewards for having played eight different Game Pass titles in a given month, so I gave it a shot.

This isn’t a review since I didn’t play it enough, but the beauty of being a blogger rather than a professional reviewer is that you can just throw in the towel whenever you want. And after 5 hours of Relic Hunters Legends, I think I’ve had enough. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t a great game either, and there are plenty of great games out there waiting to be played.

RHL is a looter-shooter that seems like it was maybe made for kids? Your character is a kid, the art-style makes me think of Nickolodeon or The Cartoon Network (if either of those are still around) and the combat is pretty basic. It’s essentially a twin stick shooter played from an overhead perspective. Enemies are anthropomorphic animals, primarly ducks and turtles in the early game.

At the start of the game you answer some questions like it is 1985 and you’re playing Ultima IV. At the end of this you get assigned a Planet, which I guess is a class. Eventually you can unlock the other classes but until you do, you have the joy of getting lots of loot your class can’t use. That’s always fun. At least you can break useless gear down for components, which are then used to upgrade gear you CAN use. Upgrading gear (whether through drops of new stuff or improving what you have) is the main way of getting stronger. There’s a level system but it just seems to be there to gate gear and not to make you inherently more powerfull.

My assumption is that they really want you to play this with friends, and I played it solo, so keep that in mind. What’s odd is that in the tutorial mission you are joined with some NPC companions, but once you get into the main game you don’t have access to them. I think adding bots to play along side of would’ve made the game more interesting. But anyway as is typical for this kind of game, it’s probably more entertaining when you’re on comms with your friends and you’re laughing at how that one guy keeps running off the edge of the world or whatever. The tutorial mission with NPC pals was frenetic and kind of fun.

Playing solo I tended to charge ahead, then fall back to let my skill cooldowns expire, which was effective but dull. The two mission types I experienced were skirmish (kill your way through a couple of short levels, then take on a boss) and ‘escort the payload’ (where you have to hang out near a vehicle and it moves forward, unless enemies are near it). The skirmish mission was easy until I got to the boss, and it wiped the floor with me. I thought I was going to have to grind the mission over and over until I realized I could respawn and the damage to the boss wouldn’t reset. So I just chewed away at him, dying probably a dozen times before he finally went down. On a second run, after having gotten some better loot from finishing the mission once, I had to respawn three times.

The Escort mission was arguably more interesting but since the payload only moves when you’re near it, you could still fall back and wait for things like your heal skill to cooldown so you could fix yourself up. It didn’t appear that the payload took any damage so I’m not sure if you can even fail these missions. I beat that one the first try.

The art style and the lack of fail-states is what makes me think the game was intended for kids.

When you’re not doing missions there a hub-world to run around in. This felt like another situation where it might be more interesting if you were running around in it with friends but as a solo player I just found running back and forth to be a little tedious.

I don’t have much BAD to say about Relic Hunters Legends; it’s fine. It just doesn’t really sparkle in any way. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $7.00 USD and might be worth a purchase at that price (there’s also a demo) but at the regular price of $20 it just needs more of a hook to be worth it.