This year marks a milestone for Relic Hunters, a series of games which will assuredly have more eyes on it this week. Jimmy, Pinkyy, Ace, Panzer, and the rest of the Spaceheart’s crew have been blasting ducks and digging for treasure since 2015’s Relic Hunters Zero, a twin-stick looter-shooter largely influenced by Vlambeer’s Nuclear Throne with a plucky cartoon veneer. Now, with Relic Hunters Legend entering Early Access, the most ambitious incarnation of Brazilian studio Rogue Snail’s original IP is finally open to the public, and it already features a robust campaign from day one.
While Relic Hunters Legend was technically announced six full years ago, the current version of the game went through several different apparent iterations, pricing concepts, and visual designs on the way to this EA release. Incorporating aspects of the Netflix Games-published Relic Hunters Rebels, Legend feels like Rogue Snail’s full-fat debut as a studio, a content-rich and characterful perpetually online looter-shooter that accomplishes that rare feat: delivering a worthy and thoughtful singleplayer story campaign, which Screen Rant was able to preview over the past weeks.
The Story Thus Far
After crash landing their Spaceheart ship on a planet known as The Cradle, the titular Relic Hunters quickly establish themselves among the rebel factions in the fight against the villainous Ducan Empire. Much of the game’s story revolves around the team’s newest recruit Seven, a white-haired time-traveler with devastating powers, and plays out through cinematic segues in between combat missions. Longtime fans of the rest of Relic Hunters Legend’s cast should fear not, though, with extended quest lines already drawn for Pinkyy, Ace, Raff, and Jimmy, all of whom can be unlocked swapped between on the world map (Rogue Snail has also hinted that Panzer and Biu will be getting more attention in future content updates).
For the uninitiated, the Relic Hunters are a plucky band of treasure-chasing space heroes, digging up powerful relics and squaring off against the duck-like Ducans. The action is always viewed from an isometric perspective, with the pixelated visuals in earlier games eventually giving way to the new smoothly animated pop art style found in Relic Hunters Legend and Rebels.
A Colorful Co-Op Action Cartoon
The updated visuals helps the combat stay sharp and easily readable, with each character able to fire their guns in any direction, strafe, dodge, and activate combat powers and ultimate abilities on cooldowns. While not a platformer per se, the game’s many different maps tend to feature a lot of verticality, with Ace’s jetpack ability a handy tool to reach higher ground or hover in the air while shooting at enemies below. Relic Hunters Legend’s levels include access points to caves and buildings, secret hidden chests to sniff out, resource points to farm, boss mobs, and environmental hazards.
The game uses many familiar concepts found in other looter-shooters, like gear rank scores, heaps of randomized drops, a rainbow of upgrade materials and currencies, and customizable cosmetics. Relic Hunters Legends takes the tropes and mechanics from multiplayer-focused FPS games like Destiny and Borderlands and adds some novel mod cons to smooth over bumpier patches; for instance, enhanced guns can have their levels transferred over to similar-tiered weapons for a small fee, and any ongoing faction quests can be conveniently cashed in from the in-game menu at any time.
Looting, Shooting, and Microtransactions
Those factions can eventually be interacted with in the Secret Market, Relic Hunters Legend’s primary hub area, which is a great showcase for Rogue Snail’s delightfully diverse character designs. There’s various anthropomorphic animal denizens to chat with, side quests to trigger, and vendors and faction leaders with special items for sale (which will presumably rotate once the game is live). Default item storage can be upgraded for more space, though this and other premium microtransaction elements were not available to test in this preview.
At some point in its development, Relic Hunters Legend was positioned as a freemium game, and certain F2P aspects remain, despite its $14.99 price tag. Aside from storage capacity, these appear to be purely cosmetic options that do not impact gameplay whatsoever. Some consumers may rightfully balk at the relatively limited default hub storage, especially in a game with an impressive amount of drops to collect, recycle, and reorganize.
Consider, also, how inventory is managed between characters. Players eventually unlock five playable heroes, but each of them shares one single hub storage and one gear set. In other words, if playing as Seven with an upgraded gadget equipped, swapping to Ace means that this same gadget will take up a slot in Ace’s inventory, even if he can’t equip it. Perhaps this system was set in place so that players wouldn’t just delegate an unlocked character to stand in as a temporary storage device, but it’s an inelegant and confusing concept to understand.
Mission Variety for Any-Sized Parties
There are eight different mission types to play in Relic Hunters Legend at time of EA launch, including exploration, scavenge, skirmish, and defense. Some may see the hunters guiding a payload to a checkpoint, protecting treasures from attacking hordes, or just scouring a level for chests and resources between enemy ambushes. Many of these missions tend to land under the ten-minute mark, encouraging a casual pick-up-and-play approach, though tougher and more elaborate encounters can skew a little longer and yield greater rewards.
Missions are selectable from a world map and each boast a gear rank score, meaning that under-equipped hunters below the given threshold will face fierce opposition, but it’s yet surmountable with the right co-op group and some savvy play. A fail state foregoes mission rewards, but any collected item and resource drops are still retained. Special story missions are one-offs and tied to each hero, but a range of daily challenges and raids means there’s always a good amount of options to choose from for any gear rank.
Before properly starting a mission, players can bide their time in the dropship waiting for others to join or tinkering with their loadout. Primary and secondary weapons can always be hotswapped with a button press, and equipment can even be completely managed mid-session; this fully pauses games in singleplayer but doesn’t in multiplayer, which is another nice QOL feature for solo-questers.
Built for Multiplayer, Accessible to Solo Players
The combat, most importantly, is a joy, even with a 4-player party filling the screen with ability animations, bullets, and explosions. Feedback is sharp, and status effects and elemental affinities can be exploited with a collaborative combo mechanic of priming/detonating, a matter which becomes necessary at the highest levels of play. Everyone will find their favorite hero picks, but each of their power sets feel great to use, and can be additionally upgraded and modified with special equipment. For instance, ultimate abilities can be upgraded with healing side effects, guns can be triggered to fire multiple projectiles at once, and status effects can layer AOE damage onto nearby enemies or shield players.
Relic pieces can also be found, which eventually can be crafted into melee tools with different effects. For the majority of our Relic Hunters Legend preview we utilized the Thunder Hammer, which prompted lightning effects on hit which would chain to nearby enemies, but additional relics can be unlocked by completing special missions, purchasing pieces from faction shops, and taking down champion elites.
While we had limited opportunities to experience the depth of Relic Hunters Legend’s online potential, the multiplayer was clean and lag-free, and it was cool to see random players roaming around the Secret Market. Players can activate trades with each other, team up for missions, or just mind their own business pursuing singleplayer content unconstrained. When in a group, singleplayer missions remain available on the map, with individual players temporarily removed from their party and returned on completion. It’s a strange mechanic, and we couldn’t fully test its ease of use, but could prove a helpful inclusion if a group member wants to trigger a quick cinematic to reach an otherwise gated part of the map.
Final Thoughts
Relic Hunters Legend is proving to be a terrific value in EA and, with Gearbox handling publishing duties, there’s hope that this game continues to get the support it will need along the way to v1.0. It hits that perfect combination of substantive content right out of the box with room to expand left over, and timed MMO-styled in-game events could help increase its value and keep players committed for the long haul.
The only snags here are the storage-related microtransactions and lack of local co-op, the latter of which does not seem to be part of Rogue Snail’s roadmap. The game is an online-only offering and cannot be played offline at all, but folks who skew more towards singleplayer games should note the game’s apparent generosity to lone guns who’d prefer not to play with anyone else. We spent most of our time in this preview without co-op company and still had a great time.
On the other hand, multiplayer fans should consider Relic Hunters Legend an easy recommendation at this stage. Fun little gameplay inserts – like the Secret Market’s museum which hosts actual fan art, or the special currency rewards for joining missions to help players requesting assistance – describe a thoughtful and welcoming multiplayer design, and later-game challenges certainly call for co-op. With charming characters, tons of loot, and satisfying gameplay depth, co-op fans should jump into this one early.
Source: Relic Hunters Universe/YouTube
Relic Hunters Legend is out now in Early Access on Steam for PC.
