Renowned Fantasy IP ‘LEGEND OF THE FIVE RINGS’ Video Game Adaption Revealed

Embark on a desperate quest to cull a rising threat and become the commander of an ancient samurai clan tasked with defending the Emerald Empire.

Skövde, Sweden - 1 August 2024: Developer Palindrome Interactive, Amplifier Game Invest and Asmodee Entertainment are thrilled to reveal first details of their upcoming video game title Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings, based on the globally known fantasy world of Legend of the Five Rings. First revealed at Gen Con, Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings is a single-player roguelite adventure.

Venture Beyond the Veil

Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings blends deckbuilding, roguelite gameplay mechanics and strategic combat, thrusting players into the command of the Crab Clan, a samurai clan of Rokugan tasked with defending the Wall that protects the empire from the Shadowlands, a twisted wasteland haunted by evil. Players must embark on a dangerous quest beyond the Wall to investigate an emerging threat and fend off monsters of darkness, train up their troops, acquire new abilities and strategize to ensure that the Emerald Empire is not overrun.

Strategize, Plan, Execute

Core gameplay of Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings rests in assuming the role of a commander leading an expeditionary force beyond the Wall. Players must recruit both seasoned veterans and newly minted samurai to their cause and guide them through the dangers of the Shadowlands, managing the troops’ deployment and embarking on quests to defeat key threats.

Combat isn’t always the answer either, as some threats are too dangerous to take on head first. Knowing when to fight or retreat will be key, and as the Crab Clan progresses towards its goal, its warriors will get more powerful, offering access to stronger cards which unleash devastating abilities on all foes. Each character the player recruits offers a different set of cards, and combining them will lead to defeating even the strongest monsters of the Shadowlands.

A Vast Universe

The original Legend of the Five Rings collectable card game was designed and published in 1995 by Alderac Entertainment Group. The game takes place in the land of Rokugan where clans of samurai, spellcasters, and courtiers vie for victory on the battlefield and prestige in the Imperial Court. While conflict and political intrigues divide the clans, the true threat awaits in the darkness of the Shadowlands, beyond the vast Carpenter Wall. In the Shadowlands, hordes of monsters, demons, and undead prepare to invade Rokugan in the name of their fallen master.

Since the original card game launched, Legend of the Five Rings has been adapted into a Living Card Game, several roleplaying games, a live action roleplaying game, board games, novels, art books, and a graphic novel. Rokugan also served as an official campaign setting for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings marks the first-ever video game adaptation of this popular franchise.

For more information about the game, visit the official Legend of the Five Rings website.

About Palindrome Interactive:

Palindrome Interactive is a strategy game development company based in Skövde, Sweden. The studio consists of close to 20 passionate developers that all share a love of strategy games. The goal is to become a world leader within the strategy games genre and to create some of the most enjoyable tactical and strategic game experiences possible. The studio released its first title “Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars” together with strategy game publisher Kalypso in September 2020. Palindrome Interactive was fully acquired by Amplifier Game Invest & Embracer Group in August 2020.

Subscribe to the newsletter on Palindrome Interactive website and follow on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Find out more about Legend of the Five Rings here

About Asmodee Entertainment:

Asmodee Entertainment exists to expand the Asmodee IPs into sectors adjacent to board games, such as video games, movies and TV shows, cultural products, toys and social/live entertainment. This gives our core fans more opportunities to engage with the brands and stories they love, and enables us to reach new customers in new markets with a wide variety of exciting, quality products and experiences based on our IPs. Our global team licenses to established industry partners who distribute products through their own third-party networks.

About Amplifier Game Invest:

Amplifier Game Invest, based in Stockholm, Sweden, seeks and invests internationally in the most talented companies in the gaming industry. The goal is, through the addition of expertise and experience in game development, to strengthen the companies and create more successful games in the long term. Amplifier Game Invest currently has active operations in companies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Austria, Spain, UK, Canada and the US. Amplifier Game Invest is a wholly owned subsidiary of Embracer Group AB.

Article by: Susan N.

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Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars - XB1 Review

Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars by developer Palindrome Interactive and publisher Kalypso Media—Microsoft Xbox One Review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Will a complex strategy game become unwieldy when brought from PC to console? That is often the question I find myself wondering when I get a chance to delve into the genre with a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard. Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars has long been a title I’ve eyed picking up on Steam, due to its intriguing blend of card game, strategy and RPG elements – all genres I gravitate towards. Seeing it get a more recent release on console however, I was excited to finally give it a go and am happy to say that the transition seems to have gone very smoothly and the end result is a deep and entertaining hybrid of gaming genres.

I cannot imagine playing this title without going through the tutorial, so that is where I will begin. This vampire-themed strategy game feels very dense to start. You get a mostly-overhead view of an army squatting in a province and you’re told to click this, that and the other to advance. At first it all looked pretty – but also pretty overwhelming. Thankfully as I worked through the step-by-step tutorial, I not only because to understand the controls and the buttons mapped to specific things on the map, but also the concepts behind Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars. My confuse soon gave way to the realization that despite its numerous menu items and detailed maps, the interface is actually quite well streamlined.

This is more of a combat tactics than simulation / strategy game. You’re not managing resources the way you might in the 4X genre, but you do have some currency-like resources that you gather and use to purchase / recruit troops along the way. Each map sees you starting in a home base that has a relatively limited number of options for constructing your army, but as you move outward into the various provinces within the map, you can claim them and the resources within. There might be villages or caves that can be used to recruit humanoid or beastly soldiers, other manors to forge noble lords from, libraries and plenty of other important landmarks that yield a variety of benefits along the way. You have action points that dictate how much your units can move or do in any given turn, and then you end that turn and time passes.

With the passage of time, other events can occur that yield new choices and benefits along the way. You may gain cards that make it easier to recruit units, or perhaps give you other kinds of bonuses. These enhancement cards don’t come into play very heavily during the earlier stages, but in later maps the right play of cards at the proper time can make for huge advantages when push comes to shove and it becomes time for combat.

Here you slide in nice and close, away from the more zoomed out world map view into a more intimate setting that has a turn-based system similar to games like King’s Bounty or Fire Emblem. You take turns moving your troops in a square / grid-based map, looking for advantages along the way. Sometimes there are bonuses on the map that give you additional perks or bonuses, other times it’s just a matter of putting the right units in the proper places to become successful (put your tank-like soldiers in front while your archers let loose from range, for example). There are also flanking mechanics that you can take advantage of – but also have to protect against as they can significantly impact unit casualties. While most of the combat will be managed by your units, shown in health / strength by the number of people in it, you will also have your lords who are singular dealers of death as well. The overall tactics aren’t the deepest in the world, but they’re satisfying enough and reward thoughtful decisions made both in combat and also in the world map outside of battles.

Content comes in the usual flavors of sandbox and campaign. The former is great if you’re looking to craft some unique scenarios but the latter is probably the most rewarding as there are different narratives to be experienced. Visually the combat stages are pretty simplistic but it’s easy to differentiate between units and varying types of terrain, so it did the job. I actually really enjoyed the overworld maps, tinged with movement, dripping with dark gothic visuals and a suitably well-matched soundtrack that complimented the theme of the campaign stories quite nicely.

I will say that once I got the hang of the controller, navigation, but it did take me a bit longer than I would have liked. Even when I had gotten through the tutorial, it was not always clear to me what I was supposed to be doing when. Clicking on units is easy enough, and most meaningful tasks are assigned to the X button, but navigating some of the menus early on was something of an adventure as it wasn’t always clear to me how I was supposed to be accessing what. Maybe it would have been easier with a mouse because I could simply move to what I wanted and clicked on it, but as it stands there were just times where I felt like I was locked into the wrong menu item and found myself flailing a bit to get back out of it and to what I intended.

The overall pacing can be somewhat problematic as well at times. Earlier chapters move along briskly, but later in the game when you’re dealing with larger maps with more provinces and units, things definitely slow down quite a bit and it is not always easy to tell which units of yours have action points left to spend or not. Thankfully one area of the design I appreciated was the end of turn mechanics, which checks and reminds you (and will jump you right to) a unit with actions left that you might not have meant to skip. I found this very helpful. In combat the battlefields could have been a bit more spacious, and the enemy AI is pretty simplistic. There’s still plenty of challenge to be had, but by the later stages I had gotten pretty good at baiting the enemy into poor decisions because they had become rather predictable.

Summary

Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars presents a very satisfying mix of different genres and aside from some UI quibbles along the way, does a good job of porting over from PC to console. The presentation works well with the vampiric theme, and while the narrative itself is nothing all that unique, the different campaigns are fun to venture through all the same. Fans of single player strategy games with some RPG and card game mechanics should enjoy this offering despite some of its flaws.

Score: 7.5 / 10

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