Freemium Perdition: DC Legends

DC Legends
Turn Based Combat
1 Player
System: Android
Developer: WB Games
Year of Release: 2016

I randomly stumbled upon an article that was announcing DC Legends, at first glance I thought it was a straight up Marvel Future Fight clone, which I was not at all opposed to. I'm a massive DC fan, much more so than Marvel, and immediately I, uh, "pre-ordered" it, for lack of a better term, which just let me know when it came out and gave me a bonus character. The game is quite a bit more simple than Future Fight come to find out.

Do you like turn based combat? If you vehemently don't then avoid this. If you can stand it, or actively enjoy it, DC Legends might be worth checking out. It is very similar to Future Fight, except there's no running around and light action elements. This is strictly a serious of turn based battles against, at least starting out, manhunters, black lanterns, and wraith versions of various heroes and villains.

Admittedly I don't give a shit about the story, when it comes to phone games I just struggle to take the story seriously, especially free to play titles. I straight up skip through dialogue as much as possible. However, it is a little odd that Hal Jordan and Zatanna have so much interaction. I don't really recall them every spending too much time together. But I guess that comes with the territory when those are two of the three guaranteed heroes to start with.

The game's main mode is broken into chapters of, usually, ten levels each, with a normal and a heroic difficulty. Three waves is typically found within with no healing in between. The combat plays out very similarly to Final Fantasy's action turn based system, with every character having different speeds, with faster characters getting to act more often. Each character has one of three classes that best each other in the standard rock-paper-scissors sort of way. There are a variety of single attacks, group attacks, buffs, debuffs and healing. The combat is fine, even if it won't convert anyone who doesn't already enjoy that style of combat.

You collect hero fragments through a variety of means, by beating levels, collecting daily rewards, fighting in an arena and, of course, microtransactions. This is a fairly typical practice based on my experience with free to play games. The really strong characters require a lot more fragments to unlock, or are flat out impossible to get without spending money. Scum bag move. I noticed a lack of a "free draw" in the shop at all. There are daily login rewards, but I feel like a free daily draw on top of that is kind of expected.

As I started to play I was easily able to conquer every fight that came my way, occasionally a teammate would die, lowering my overall score, by I didn't really struggle and kept up with my levels as I played along. Until chapter 4. Suddenly I'm stuck, not even on the boss. This is day two of playing that I've hit a grind and/or pay wall. I mentioned an arena above, which unlocks early on. This is the "PVP" aspect, where you fight computer controlled groups made by other players. You get a bonus for beating all ten listed. But if you lose to one (like if they're clearly stronger than you) it doesn't replace them. All you can do is refresh the list and hope you are able to clear the entire list. Or just grind for, well, I'm not sure how long. Guess what happened right around when I got stuck in story mode? This has really turned my opinion around.

If you'd have asked me after my first day of playing I'd recommend this to most people who really enjoy DC's amazing world (fucking Chemo is playable!). But by day two I'm already seeing the bullshit cracks behind the curtain. I think I'll keep up with this one, at least passively so, and see if they introduce more modes, or something. On top of feeling like I've almost immediately hit a wall (until I grind over the next few days/weeks) there just isn't much to do. Normal mode, heroic mode, arena, and a single daily event that, for the most part, seem to require very high levels. I was hoping for a lot more, and while I kind of enjoy this game, it could be so much better.