Raid Shadow Legends Review: Is It As Good As The Ads Say?
Over the last few months, I came across many different mobile game advertisements. One of these games specifically got showed me over and over again, and some YouTubers I watched also made a sponsored video about it. It is called Raid Shadow Legends, which is available on Android and iOS.
The ads showed us a turn-based gatcha game, in which we can get many powerful champions to explore the campaign, fight bosses, win PvP battles, and more. There are other outstanding gatcha games out there, that also share many similarities to this game, like Summoners War, One Piece Treasure Cruise, or The Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross. So let’s take us a closer look at this game and see if it can catch up with these awesome games.
How is the gameplay of Raid Shadow Legends?
When I started the game for the first time, I didn’t expect much from the game in fact of the actual gameplay mechanics. However, it follows the standard turn-based RPG mechanics, like other games that I mentioned before. In a fight, each of your champions has its own unique skills that you can choose from. Champions also differ in their affinity and in their specialized types like HP, Defense, Attack, or Support.
In the beginning, you will play a standard tutorial sequence that will introduce you to all the essential game mechanics, but every time you unlock new features like PvP, the game will explain the main mechanics as well.
After completing the tutorial, you have to play the campaign a bit, to unlock new game modes like PvP, but also the training pit, or the market on your bastion. To unlock the market, you have to reach level 15, but this can be reached very quickly (it only took me about an hour).
As I mentioned, the game is turn-based, to depending on how fast your units are, you can get the first turn. To attack an opponent, you have to choose a skill and tap on the enemy that you want to attack. If you don’t select a skill, your champion will automatically attack with his standard skill.
If you use the auto mode, your units will use their skills automatically and attack different enemies, but you can also focus the attacks of your units by tapping on an enemy. But unlike in Summoners War, you can’t change the settings on which enemy you want to focus automatically.
By clearing a stage in the campaign or in dungeons, you will unlock the next stage, which is (most of the time) a bit more challenging to clear. Raid Shadow Legends also offers the feature to play the campaign in four different difficulties; Normal, Hard, Brutal, and Nightmare. By unlocking more stages, your champions also get more Exp if you clear a stage successfully (and item drops are also possible).
Note: To unlock the hard difficulty in the campaign, you have to clear the campaign on the normal difficulty. The same goes on to unlock all the other difficulties.
When you completed a region in the campaign, you can go to the next region. But completing every stage in a region gets you more stars, which can give you some decent rewards if you reach a set amount of them. Rewards could be Silver, Gems, Ancient Shards, or Void Shards. These shards can be used to summon new champions in the portal.
And thats it for the campaign. Besides getting some equipment and Exp farming for your champions, this mode doesn’t have a real purpose (and I also was not interested in the “awesome story” at all).
However, after playing a while, dungeons get unlocked so you can farm evolving material, equipment, and artifacts, to power up champions. This is required at some point, as your opponent’s levels increase over time in the campaign. You’ll also need stronger champions to stand a chance in the arena.
Note: You can make your champions stronger by increasing their stars, leveling their skills, or equip them with decent gear that you can farm in dungeons.
In Summoners War, there is a clear ranking system in place, so new players can face opponents with similar strengths. However, when I joined the arena with some hope of new mechanics, I got pretty disappointed when I saw my opponents that I could face. 8/10 people were too powerful (maxed champions!), so I had to refresh my list for some better luck.
After finding a suitable opponent and joining the battle, I realized that I play against a (not that smart) A.I from the game. Sure this system also takes place in Summoners War, but they offer the Live Arena for real-time arena battles, which Raid doesn’t have.
Gameplay Conclusion:
For me, Raid Shadow Legends doesn’t feel like a game that the developers play by themselves, and uncomplete. It doesn’t integrate unique gameplay mechanics, but it shares a lot of similarities to Summoners War and other gatcha games.
Battles are also not very exciting or challenging, as you only have to overpower your enemies. The whole campaign could be cleared in auto mode if your champions are strong enough. It is simply growing your numbers.
Getting Exp for champions also takes a long time if you’re not strong enough to play on hard difficulty. Sure there is the training pit to get some Exp, but we have only one of five slots available in the beginning. And to unlock another slot, we have to pay an extreme amount of gems.
There is not much to do. In the first hours, I only played the campaign, some dungeons, and a few arenas match. And thats it…
How does the game look?
To make sure people don’t quit the game after a few days, Raid Shadow Legends has to look decently good. And it looks not that bad in fact of character designs and menus. However, it can’t compete with the outstanding graphics of The Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross.
During a fight in the campaign or dungeon, the background also looks very nice and colorful. The animations of each character are also well done, so we have something to look at. What I like the most are the voice-acted story sequences, but they don’t appear that often during the campaign.
In the settings, we can also change the overall graphic quality and FPS rate, on how the game runs on your smartphone. Depending on which visual quality you play with, the game can drain your battery faster.
Raid Shadow Legends heavily monetized!
Here’s probably one of the most significant flaws of this “free” mobile game by Plarium. Whenever I started the game, the game throws about one, up to five pop-ups to my face, that offer me some kind of packages to buy.
This is a huge no-go for me. If it’s only one, thats entirely okay, but up to five in a row…
This not only happens by starting the game but also after clearing a dungeon or arena battle, you could come across these pop-ups. The prices vary widely between the packages. Some only cost a few bucks, but some are more pricy (up to 50€ or more).
Packages are not the only option to spend money on the game, as we can buy gems, silver equipment, and artifacts too. Gems can be collected for free by completing missions, the battle pass, or in-game rewards (login bonus), but it takes a while to reach a decent number.
Unlocking the Mine costs 500 gems, but it generates only one gem every 4 hours and 48 minutes one level one. After one day (and two minutes), it reaches its max capacity, so it takes about 100 days, so it pays itself off. But you could buy some gem packages to unlock it faster…
Speaking of the shop, here you can buy even more packages with energy, silver, equipment and more, for real money. You can also find daily packages, limited special offers, raid cards, and regular packages.
Seeing this amount of opportunities to get your money, I feel like that this is the only job of the game.
Is Raid Shadow Legends worth to spend money on?
Spending money in Raid enables you to get much better champions and equipment than others, so you can clear dungeons faster and reach higher rankings in PvP. However, as I don’t see much long term potential in the game (at least for myself), I wouldn’t recommend spending a dime on this game.
Plarium spends a massive amount of money to market this game with ads and various Youtuber’s (they paid pretty well), to reach as many people as possible. But reaching many people doesn’t mean that the game is worth playing.
Review conclusion:
So is Raid a game that you have to play? No, it’s not. It doesn’t offer unique mechanics or overall long term potential, packages are way too expensive, and the gameplay doesn’t hook. If you are looking for excellent games that you can play for some time, I highly recommend taking a look at The Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross, One Piece Treasure Cruise, and Summoners War.
