Havok and Sony Online Entertainment Untold Legends as a series began back on the PlayStation Portable and acted as the first solid role playing game for their flagship handheld.  It brought forth a quality role-playing experience which laid the groundwork for future iterations in the series and established the brand amongst gamers.  This is why it was no surprise when Havok and Sony Online Entertainment announced that they would be bringing the title as a launch game to release day and date with Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 3 console. What is it that this sequel has that neither of the PSP versions have? PCN takes a journey into the PS3’s action RPG launch title to find out. 

First of all, it is difficult to consider Dark Kingdom as a sequel considering all three of the Untold Legend titles had very little to do with each other in terms of the plot and story. It is as if they were entirely different games but still contained the same hack and slash gameplay.

The game starts out with a very straight-forward character selection method. There are three characters that you will be able to choose from. Golan Kor (the brute-like warrior), Malakesh (the mage), or Zala (the scout). Each character has unique skills that you will be able to acquire as you gain experience and level up. Once you select a character of your liking, you are introduced with a cut scene no different than what the PSP versions introduced us with, a comic book style that has become all too dull in video games, especially next generation video games.  If the story were ground-breaking and phenomenal this would have been okay but with the Blu-ray technology having enough space and picture quality on the discs for some amazing cut scenes this is almost unmistakable. 

The short introductory scene which kicks off the game will reveal your purpose: to put an end to the dark plague of corruption overlooking the land of Dureth, the Untold Legends world. 

As a member of the Dragons Shade, you will hunt down those responsible in roughly 30 different levels. 

In terms of replay value you are looking at a game which will last you between 15 to 18 hours depending on how fast you decide to go through it.  For a role-playing game though this is an extremely short experience by many gamers standards, including mine.  Once you complete the game there is also little to make you want to go through the game again with the exception of the fact that you will get to use your character where you left off from your previous play through the game.