Review — Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story
Experience the everyday life of a Yordle tasked with restoring the magical portals in Bandle City in Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.
While League of Legends remains Riot Games’ golden ticket, they do not shy away from expanding this franchise with small-scale projects that give independent developers the chance to do their own thing within this beloved universe. We already got a turn-based RPG with Ruined King, a 2D platformer with Convergence and an enchanting adventure game with Song of Nunu. The latest title to join this A League of Legens Story series is Bandle Tale, a cozy adventure game in which you take on the role of a little Yordle with a giant problem.
In Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story, your Yordle ends his 101-year apprenticeship as a knitter in Yarnville. Your biggest dream is to explore what’s going on beyond the confines of Yarnville, and this begins with a trip to Bandle City, where a party is getting badly out of hand. The magical gates connecting the cities disappear during this party and a number of residents are sucked away to places unknown. Since these gates are made of yarn, you, the knitter, are the only Yordle who can help Bandle City.
The Life of a Yordle
Bandle Tale clearly throws League of Legends in a different direction and hands us a charming experience that focuses on the everyday life of these cute little creatures. It is a purebred cozy game and development this time was handled by Lazy Bear Games. This studio already brought us the excellent Graveyard Keeper in the past, making them the appropriate people for this new interpretation of the League of Legends universe. As in other cozy games like Stardew Valley, Fae Farm or Story of Seasons, no grand adventure full of danger and threats awaits you here. Instead, you will always be busy with the day-to-day concerns of a Yordle such as harvesting crops, expanding your home, gathering resources, making tools and products, selling things, running your food stall and, last but not least, throwing parties! Moreover, in Bandle City, things are peaceful, so there is no fighting here.
However, all this is not to say that there is no story waiting for you. In my opinion, the game itself has more story than similar games and you also have clear objectives to fulfill at all times. This provides a little more meaning to everything you can do in this game. Your progress in the game is also intertwined with the skill tree, where there is a sort of reciprocal effect. Thus, you only gain access to certain skills after you make progress in the story, but conversely, you must also acquire certain skills in order for you to fulfill certain objectives in the game. In total, you have four different skill trees to develop, each focusing on a different aspect of gameplay.
Moreover, the way you acquire skill points in the game is particularly original. Everything you do, whether it’s creating something or collecting plants, for example, gives you emotions. Instead of the usual concept of recovering stamina by going to sleep, here, by dreaming you convert your emotions into skill points when you rest. Because you can only collect a limited amount of emotions, although you will expand this later, you are thus forced to take regular naps anyway.
This is already a more pleasant way to rest your character without the usual consequences of being without stamina, which makes this concept more interesting for the player. Another nice idea is that your house is actually a magical backpack, allowing you to fold everything and easily take it with you when you change locations. This allows you to always have access to all of your facilities (workbenches, food stall, vending machine, etc.) when you go out.
A Charming Experience
A sweet gaming experience obviously includes an appropriate audio-visual style. The colorful pixel art graphics and upbeat tunes fully do this experience justice. The fact that the game appears only for PC and Nintendo Switch (for now) was not a stumbling block for me, because this genre of games, especially with this visual style, are best on a handheld console. Consequently, Bandle Tale mainly ran on my Steam Deck and the game played perfectly on it. The chosen visual style also makes the game less graphically intensive, so it will also run smoothly on less powerful computers. Both on computer and on the Steam Deck, the game actually ran flawlessly with me and I did not encounter a single bug, glitch or other technical problem.
Therefore, just because the game is less graphically intensive, thankfully, it does not mean that it’s not wonderful. The whole game exudes an awful lot of charm and the world is beautifully designed and full of details. Moreover, for players of League of Legends, it will be nice to encounter familiar faces such as Corki, Rumble, Tristana and Veigar. But even if you are not familiar with that game, you can perfectly enjoy the experience this game presents you.
Still, I have two small points of criticism. For one, the construction of the game world is not very intuitive and is sometimes downright confusing. There is an in-game map, but it is not very helpful. Because of this, it is always a small learning process to know the layout of an island and is something you have to go through almost every time you go to a new island. Additionally, it is also not always clear where to go for certain objectives. Sometimes this is more or less clearly indicated on the map, but other times, any kind of indication is missing. The lack of consistency and clarity in this was somewhat disturbing to me at times.
3,5/5
Reviewed on PC.
This review originally appeared on BeyondGaming.be.
