Raid Shadow Legends

The infamous "Raid Shadow Legends" seems to be everywhere, pushed and hyped by everyone. Android game adverts are notoriously sketchy, so what's true about this game and what isn't? Find out here.

It would be pretty impressive if by now you've never heard of Raid: Shadow Legends. The Israeli mobile game developer, team "Plarium" has seemingly an endless marketing budget for their game. Popular Youtubers, Gamers, Twitch streamers, Instagram personalities and many others have all been either offered or more likely, accepted the offer of Raid: Shadow Legends sponsorship. The ads for the game are everywhere, and they are both funny, wacky, cringy and obnoxious, all at the same time. These are just some of them, and they are trying really hard to grab your attention:

So lets dive right in and see what the game is about.

Right off the start, you get some impressive cinematic cut-scenes which are seamlessly mixed with the gameplay. Four epic heroes are on some sort of quest and you blaze with them through a couple of waves of enemies, while getting some quick exposition. Not surprisingly, they quickly encounter the boss of the dungeon, which is a very well animated dragon. Unexpectedly though, the dragon wins and brutally slays our heroes. You are then offered to choose one of the fallen heroes, revive them and start their quest properly, from the beginning.

The initial impression can be very good, graphics and animation are quite solid, and the voice acting seems to be on spot. However, this will not last, and is plainly designed to hook you in with an explosive entry. As the game progresses, voice acting becomes sparse, and there are almost no cinematic cut-scenes and special animations. Graphics are consistently good and impressive, so there's that at least. Some may be disheartened by this, but the more veteran players will know to look for less obvious aspects of the game, the meat of it, the gameplay.

However, customizing your heroes does not end there. They have their own passive trees and their abilities can be upgraded. Their rarity can be upgraded through leveling them up multiple times over, and their stats can be altered with rare resources. Where the customization truly shines though, is the itemization. The number of item sets is outrageous, so much so that it can be tedious going through them all even with filters enabled. Sets have unique effects and individual items are almost completely random, and acquire further random attributes as you upgrade them. Rolling for loot really has meaning, though it can get a bit grindy and time consuming.

Unfortunately, not all is impressive in the lands of Shadow Legends. One of your bigger frustrations will become upgrading your heroes. The usual way to upgrade their rarity is to level up and upgrade your lower grade heroes (so called "fodder) and then sacrifice those to your chosen champions. The process is pretty long and tedious and made significantly harder with the fact that you have a maximum pool of a 100 heroes at any time. This may sounds like a lot, but due to the number of different champions and the need for unique teams designed to tackle unique bosses, you will quickly find yourself starved for more champion slots.

This is where the Faction Wars comes into play, where in order to progress, you must build teams of champions from individual factions, meaning you will eventually end up with a really big roster of active heroes, and in order to have them upgraded, your inventory juggling skills will be tested sorely as the room for fodder becomes ever more scarce.

While the game is entirely playable without ever paying a single dime, some shop exclusive items will make your life considerably easier in your management of champions. Prepare to be bombarded with a ridiculous amount of shop offers and deals, which will sometimes take literal minutes of clicking through before you can get to the game.

Overall, if you are looking for a hero collector RPG looter sort of game, this is one of the better ones out there. Memes aside, considering the game is truly free (meaning that there are no actual paywalls and tricks to hook you in later on), giving this one a go may be a good idea.

So what is Raid: Shadow Legends? Well, it's a fairly classic champion collection game with strong RPG elements. Your goal is to build a team of heroes whom you will be leading through various battles, improving them with resources, experience and time. While the concept itself isn't terribly original, you will be pleasantly surprised to discover the sheer amount of content packed into the game. In the beginning, you will be limited by the classic stamina system, so you may not be able to play as much as you want. This quickly stops being a problem however, as with your progress stamina becomes overabundant and almost un-spendable.