Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story Review – A party a day keeps the doctor away!

Who says that video games have to stress you out? There are plenty of reasons to play a game, even just for the calmness it brings you in the moment. Games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moon are all games that thrive on some fun storytelling while the gameplay is mostly calming and enjoyable just to sit down and play. This is where Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story finds a middle ground!

In Bandle Tale you take the role as a Yordle of your own creation. The character customization includes everything from hairstyles to scarf colors, as well as your preferred pronouns. This is really fun and made me feel included in the world even if I wasn’t familiar with the Yordles other than Heimerdinger, who I met in Arcane. While previous knowledge of League of Legends helps get some of the references like the item “Heimerdinger’s goggles,” you don’t need to know anything about the world to have a good time with the story.

Your Yordle’s (my name was Rex) grandfather is a master yarn-smith with the entire Yordle culture knowing how good he is at knitting and putting together the power of this weave. He warns you that it’s time for you to explore the world as a whole, but warns not to trust everyone you meet. Your grandfather hands you a new leg he knit for you so that you can move faster throughout the world.

As you begin your journey, you’re met by your best friend who helps you realize how much you want to go to a party held by another master-knitter, Ozzy. Ozzy has a reputation for being reckless, and well, that recklessness ends up causing a major issue and the islands and portals are all broken and the Yordles can’t get to each other without a plane or balloon. During this Ozzy, and your friends all go missing. You work with Tristana moving forward to get everyone back and fix the portals with your portal yarn.

The gameplay, while repetitive, can be a lot of fun. Your goal in most areas is to throw a party so amazing that the Yordles provide the energy you need for crafting, accessing new abilities, and more. These parties are your creation allowing you to modify music choice, lighting, what kind of activities, and more. Another main story mission is setting up a pop-up restaurant for the townspeople. During this you’ll put on your cooking hat and get to work. You’ll have access to everything from Beets to Bananas. Your job is to follow instructions to make the meal as quickly as possible. I got 100% just a few times, but it does present some challenges! These activities can feel monotonous at times, especially needing all the materials to get things working. Let’s go over that now…

Crafting is extremely easy to understand in Bandle Tale, and they do a great job explaining so that nothing feels overly overwhelming. However, getting all the materials that you need to make the items you need takes a while and a lot of the materials are timed restocks. Basically, you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can get MORE of an item after you took it the first time. For some things like leaves, yarn, etc; they are pretty readily available and you can make circuits. Other things like the bug parts you’ll need in the school island are harder to obtain in a quick manner. I found myself sitting in front of the items I needed and would wait and play on my phone or run in circles in the area of the game. While this doesn’t detract from the chill vibes of the game, it did make me pay a little less attention each time.

During your first section, you obtain a backpack house, which will be your place to throw parties, have your kitchen, and more. At the backpack you’ll also gain more and more workbench style items you can put inside or outside on the workbench rug (which we’ll discuss in a moment). These can do everything from help plant trees or other crops, craft new items, fix up old items, color items, etc. There’s a lot to do and not a ton of space, so learning what can work best where is a MUST.

The rugs are another fun feature that I enjoyed. During different game moments, you’ll get a rug for kitchen, parties, sales, and working. Each one you can place items on and it’ll stay there after you roll the rug back up. The kitchen and party rugs are pretty self-explanatory. You’ll be planning your Pop-Up and parties on those rugs. The sales rug comes from a side quest and allows you to sell items to other Yordles if you have too much of one thing and need some gems. The workbench rug is VERY helpful while crafting because you can place items to change to something else and leave it to do other tasks and come back and it’ll still be working on them without your help. This made crafting later in the game MUCH easier and less tedious.

The plot isn’t one of violence, and the stakes never feel overly high at any point. But you know your goal is to find your friends and restart the portals. Everything before that is pretty laid back and fun. You’re able to do more pop-ups if you like that, or sell things, it really allows you the freedom to do what you want and as long as you’re moving forward, the rewards are always helpful in some form. If you like cozy and cute games full of cute and fuzzy friends, you’ll want to get your hands on Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.

Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story is available on PC and Nintendo Switch

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