A Legionary’s Life

A Legionary’s Life is a text-based indie game that follows the career of a legionary during the rise of the Roman Republic, through the Second Punic War and the Second Macedonian War. Over this time, the player character goes from raw recruit to seasoned veteran — or dies trying.

This is another game that will not be for everybody. Besides the limited production values, players must have the patience to repeatedly die and start again! Those who persist will discover a satisfying combat system and sense of progression.

What do you do in the game? (Fight. A lot.)

A Legionary’s Life moves between two layers:

• Camp — Here you work out, or practice with the javelin or the sword. Considerations include time and stress from over-exercise. This also includes a top-down foraging minigame.
• Battles — The meat of the game. See below:

The key pieces of information are:

• The red dial — health. Going to zero is a game over.
  • In this case, I (Tigris) am near full health while the Gallic Mercenary is nearly dead.
• The blue dial — stance. Being off balance incurs a penalty. This happens if you missed a blow and lost your balance, or because your opponent successfully feinted or shield-bashed you. The same is true in reverse.
  • Again, here I have the advantage: my stance is full while the Gallic Mercenary is slightly off-balance.
• The green dial — fatigue. Tired fighters perform worse.
  • In this case, I am at the second level of fatigue (the small walking stick icon), while the Gallic Mercenary is a bit more than halfway through the first level.
• The red / blue bar under the dials — you can toggle this to blue to get a bonus to defence and a penalty to offence, or vice-versa.
• The combatants’ equipment.
  • I am fully armoured, albeit in light linen, while the Gallic Mercenary only has his sword and shield.

While this looks simple, there is a fair bit of strategy behind it. For example:

• The relative ability of the combatants is crucial. You can get away with more risks against weaker enemies. Conversely, when outmatched, it’s probably better to play defensively and wait for opponents to stagger before counterattacking them, or just stay alive.
• Similarly, armour makes a big difference. The torso is easiest to hit, so unarmoured light infantry are beatable by going for their chest. But against heavy infantry in good armour, it’s better to wear them down by going for their arms and legs.
• Different battles have varying lengths and numbers of enemies:
  • In battles between two armies, enemies will spawn infinitely up to the turn limit, but staying alive counts as a victory.
  • On the other hand, smaller encounters such as duels have a finite number of enemies, but go until death.
  • Some battles also impose a time limit for story reasons — for example, when trying to save the life of a wounded comrade. This may call for a high-risk, high-reward strategy — going for the head or neck.

Going from zero to hero is half the fun

How does this play out?

• In general, the further through the game I was and the more powerful my character, the more aggressively I played.
• At one extreme, I beat an experienced, well-armoured Carthaginian nobleman in a duel by playing very, very defensively and waiting for him to tire out.
• At the other extreme, being the first man over the walls during a siege required beating many individually weak militiamen, within a strict time limit. I had to take risks, fight aggressively, and put my faith in superior gear and skill to carry me through.

The flip side is that I die a lot in this game, especially early on. This is typical:

• Starting characters in A Legionary’s Life have the skills — and survivability — of XCOM rookies.
• New players don’t know the battle system and will probably take too many risks.

Death is permanent, but a good score will result in more points for character setup in future runs. The story progression is scripted — replayability comes from trying again, and aiming for a higher score or better ending.

It took me 10 tries before I successfully cleared the game on my 11th run. This was my proudest moment:

That was a 5 vs 1 fight (fortunately the 5 enemies didn’t come all at once) to save the life of a wounded Roman. My character became a hero that day, earning a Civic Crown. He later became a centurion, survived the wars, and eventually became a Senator. Hurray!

… Then I died on my next run. The fortunes of war are fickle.

Conclusions

A Legionary’s Life is a good example of a simple indie game with a limited scope that achieves its goal. It’s engaging, historically enlightening, and makes me try again after defeat (… once I overcome my frustration).

With a Steam sale on as I write this, there’s probably no better time to give it a look.

Further reading

A Bay 12 Games forum thread I found helpful when starting out.