Previews// Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code (PSP)

The opportunity for weapons and special attacks is huge, however. Enemies will drop countless items ranging from potions to armour and weapons, and each character has a standard close-range attack and a long-range attack method. Switching these attack modes using L and Circle, Chaffer comes with a big claw that can lob electric balls around. As you level up, you get points for magic attacks that can be assigned to Triangle, Circle and the D-Pad. Pressing Select opens the menu to do this, and the scope for advancing your character's abilities are vast. Not only do you get levels for your magic attacks too, but you can equip materials to weapons and armour with available slots to increase your own attributes. Chaffer found a groovy little magic trick that electrocuted all the enemies around him and flung them a few feet away - good for a cooked beast. Well done or medium rare, sir?

And while we're on the subject of beasts, it appears you are one. Not you in particular, dear reader. We're not dissin' you or anything. We mean in the game. You have a circular gauge beneath your health bar, which increases every time you collect essence from fallen monsters. Once it's full, holding L and Triangle will transform you into a furry creature of death and destruction for a limited time. Quite strange, but pretty cool. You can collect Runes to equip your growling alter-ego through the Select menu too, and any enemies you've encountered will appear in a Beastiary, which makes for a bit of light reading if you get bored at all.


Which, like the bane of many an MMORPG, is a slight downside to The Warrior's Code. Try as you may to dispel it, the unwritten rule in gaming appears to be that if you make an online RPG, the single player story will suffer - because perhaps the experience is too tailored for multiplayer action. Chaffer was having a whale of a time slashing ugly ogres with his 'illegal-in-17-countries' blades, but he did feel a little bit lonely. Having said that, there were plenty of enemies in the levels, so he never got bored while running down a thousand corridors. Although there was a section where he had to backtrack, which made things slightly more mundane. A little less of that, if you please.

We haven't had the opportunity to try out the multiplayer modes, either ad-hoc or online, but we can imagine Warrior's Code is a much more colourful experience with a few mates on board, rather than on your tod. We did manage to open the server room (albeit in an unconnected state) and discovered the menus to be quite nicely arranged, with a chat option included too. While playing the solo mode, we found that holding L and pressing Square brought up a menu that presumably is for communicating with your team. It wasn't much use to us, obviously. There doesn't appear to be a manual keyboard option a la Phantasy Star Online however; a shame, as it sort of limits the cameraderie that you may otherwise have with one. I guess Sony isn't prepared to have phrases such as 'Blithering Tits' or 'Confounding Crap Nuggets' littering the server.


Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code is heading for a March release in the US and will be hitting British stores this April. It has the potential of being something special on an online scale, and the levels so far look to provide us with an enjoyable action experience. Those starved of a good PSP online game should track this with interest.