There has been a recent surge in quality video game titles from lesser known European and Russian companies. Beginning with the release of The Witcher and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky last year and King’s Bounty and Drakensang this year, there have been a lot of both great and interesting games crossing the Atlantic recently. This isn’t to say that Europe and Russia weren’t producing great games beforehand. It’s just that I’ve grown accustomed to enjoying these games more than most big releases from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. They’re also great PC games, uncompromising in their pursuit of a particular kind of gaming experience.

Approaching Elven Legacy, I was prepared to be pleasantly entertained by it in the same fashion and its lack of pandering to the console crowd. From afar, it definitely looks like the kind of game that one could sink hours, if not days, into. Set in a typical fantasy universe full of fey elves, dour orcs, and other Tolkienesque standbys, the game explores an extremely familiar world, characters, and narrative.

I’d like this to be the point where I talk about how none of that matters or how the game takes these familiar genre tropes and subverts them with interesting storytelling devices or the like. Instead, I’m to be the bearer of sad tidings: Elven Legacy is not only rough around the edges, it’s rough even where there aren’t edges. It creates a relatively interesting space within which to explore a compelling turn based strategy game complete with serviceable graphics, but it makes every second in that game space a kind of toil.

Your introduction to the game sets the tone for the disappointment that’s bound to follow. An incoherent and glitchy cutscene introduces the player to a story of stoic elves and mages—a story that we’ll be suffering through many game hours. Right away, one of the game’s more glaring issues complicates things: every once in a while, dialogue will be missing or skipped in a cutscene. Not only is this silence disorienting, it ruins whatever atmosphere the designers were trying to create in the scene.

Unfortunately when you get past the stutters, the story isn’t any more interesting. It’s completely opaque, involving dark forces, stern warriors, and strident voices. You’ll forget what each mission is about before you’ve started it, and, by the end of the mission, you won’t care. Once you get in mission, it’s not as if all is forgiven. Instead, the gameplay proves to be competent, if unexciting. It’s a straightforward hex-based strategy game with a relatively complicated set of rules and a persistent, interesting RPG-style development overlay.

Units can die, and, since you level up your units and heroes as the game progresses, the loss of a powerful upgraded unit is not to be underestimated. There’s a lot of cool powers and abilities and a fair share of minute skill upgrades. This translates into what should be a great inducement to play more of the game, since the farther you get, the more unique and multifaceted your units will be.

This just never works out, though, because persistent stats and a boring fantasy setting aren’t quite enough to maintain interest here. If the characters and units you control are beyond boring, beyond clichéd, why should you care about what level they are? Games like Heroes of Might and Magic and King’s Bounty trade on their strategic depth and RPG systems, but they also trade on their character. If you’ve played these games, then you have your favorite units, and they’re not your favorites just because they’re tough. You like them because they’re cool to see in action or because the fiction behind them interests you. Most of all, you can remember them as distinct and they stand out as something different from the rest of those vast fantasy armies.

In Elven Legacy, there’s no such recognition and no such uniqueness. Units are bland and unexciting even at higher levels. The coolest and most interesting units are constantly hampered by their lack of character or their weaknesses. I’d love to play around with my beautiful airship, but it annoys me how unpleasant it is to field within every battle and how it’s nowhere near as good as the boring base ground units.

When it comes down to it, Elven Legacy is broken by its lack of originality, its lack of one genuine moment that you can identify as being solely its own. Even games I detest have these moments, times when I realize I’ve just experienced something a bit different from the way I’ve experienced something similar in another game. This never happened during my time with Elven Legacy. It’s just a string of badly written cutscenes, bad voice acting, and clunky combat.

Strategy and unit command games can either succeed on their combat or their personality. In fact, you can sometimes have one and not the other and still get by. Anyone who remembers Relic’s Impossible Creatures will know what I’m talking about. That game had a play style that made Elven Legacy’s look polished and accomplished; yet, I enjoyed it a good deal, thanks to its innovative, inventive unit splicing system. Good strategy games mix great gameplay with a moderately diverting world while the best settle for nothing less than interesting, fleshed out worlds.

Elven Legacy never impresses itself on you seriously. Long after you’ve completed it, the most you’ll be able to remember about it is how bad the writing was. Maybe there’s a glimmer of interesting experiences to be had in this game, somewhere deep inside. To find it, you’re going to have to look long and hard.