I love NIS America and the niche they so masterfully know how to fulfill, but I don’t understand them at times. How can a company known for widely celebrated franchises like Disgaea, Ys, Trails, and R-Type decide to occasionally release duds like Shadow Corridor, Giraffe and Annika, and Disaster Report? Another game to be added to the latter pile, sadly enough, is Labyrinth Legend, a former mobile dungeon crawler which just so happened to receive a brand new Switch port. Not exactly a genre lacking in titles for the system, especially from NIS themselves, but oh well, what can I do? Let’s check this one out.

Labyrinth Legend is an action RPG / dungeon crawler hybrid of the most generic type. Writing about it ended up being more complicated than expected due to the fact there is very little to talk about. You have seen and played countless games like this one in the past: create a character, be thrown into a hub, select the “go to dungeon” option, venture through a few floors, kill enemies, collect loot, then fight a boss at the end of the titular labyrinth. Upon defeating said boss, which often is devoid of any meaningful cognitive skills, you unlock a new dungeon with a new set of enemies and loot. Keep repeating the cycle until you eventually get massively bored.

First impressions were rough, given the game’s utterly uninteresting pixel-based visuals. I was thrown into a brief, but excruciatingly boring tutorial session, where I got to learn all half dozen bits of information needed to get a hold of the game’s combat. It’s as mindless as it gets: hold down the attack button to infinitely spam your sword attack, or hold down another attack button to infinitely shoot arrows. There is not penalty for spamming: your attacks never become weaker, nor do you have a limited supply of arrows. The game can’t even be called a button masher because, honestly, you don’t need to mash buttons… ever. Hold down B and see everything in front of you disappear.

With the exception of maybe one or two randomly generated rooms filled with enemies, where the act of slashing everyone to bits felt microscopically cathartic, I cannot say I was able to find any bit of enjoyment whatsoever while playing Labyrinth Legend. It was so boring. It is even hard to find something worth praising. Well, there’s the soundtrack, which is actually pretty good, but at the same time, it is so much better than the rest of the game as a whole that it actually feels completely out of place, as if it belonged on a much better (and more polished) title.

You need to be a die-hard dungeon crawling fan in order to have fun with Labyrinth Legend. As in, you have played literally every other dungeon crawler, hack ‘n’ slash and RPG available for the system, and simply cannot wait for anything else for much longer. Between its mediocre visuals, unappealing presentation, borderline mindless gameplay loop, and complete lack of interesting set pieces or boss battles, there is really no reason to give this aggressively bland title a go, when there are literal dozens of much better dungeon crawlers available on the Switch. Ironically enough, most of them coming from NIS America themselves.

Graphics: 5.0 Think of the most generic pixel art found in an RPG Maker custom artwork forum. Labyrinth Legend‘s graphics are even less interesting.	Gameplay: 5.5 Nothing inherently wrong with the gameplay in terms of whether it works or not. It’s just bland and uninteresting. This combat is so mindless it can occasionally be a little, tiny, minuscule bit fun.
Sound: 7.5 For as bland and boring as this game is, its soundtrack was so good it felt like it should have been included in a different (and much better) game.	Fun Factor: 3.0 Calling Labyrinth Legend bland is an understatement. It’s so devoid of creativity or interesting facts that the act of writing about it became a much harder chore than it should have been.
Final Verdict: 4.5

Labyrinth Legend is available now on PC, Switch and mobile.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Switch was provided by the publisher.