Game Review - Transformers Legends
Review of the mobile phone game: Transformers Legends
Been playing this non-stop. Thought I would give my impressions of it :)
Gameplay: This is the first card-type game I have ever played so someone else is probably more suited to review it than I am, having no idea if it is great or awful compared to other games of the genre. All I can say is I have found it mildly diverting. The idea is to get copies of every card for your Cyberindex, and to have a hand of nine powerful cards with which to do battle.
Playing against other players: Whoever has the best hand wins, nuff said. Must say it has been quite annoying that as say a level 35 I would get constantly challenged by people who are level 50 and higher. Go and pick on someone your own size ya big bullies! However it feels damn good when one of them loses to you. A shame it is not more interactive, ya pretty much press the fight button and off it goes.
Playing the Mission: If you play as a Decepticon, Swoop flies in and fires 1 to 3 missiles at you randomly. If you play an Autobot, Ramjet does the same thing and you stop the missiles by tapping your screen. Would have been good for them to change up who is attacking you instead of the same bot every single level. Also, there are only a half doz backgrounds which gets repetitive and dull. One level was named ‘Explore the Underground Lava Lakes’ and I was in a damn forest!
Card Collecting: The main aim of the game. Pretty easy to get all the lvl 1(common) & 2 (uncommon) cards, its the 3’s (rare) & 4’s (super rare) you strive for. All unwanted character cards can be sold or used to power up other characters. When you get a characters robot mode and their alt mode cards you can transcan them together to become more powerful. Also if you power up both cards BEFORE you transcan them together, then when you do they will go back to a higher version of their original form, and that can be repowered up to become super-powerful. This however would take a loooong time so you would have to have a lot of patience. You can also get weapons cards, assign them to characters and power them up as well. Silly thing with the weapons though is that the gun that has a characters name (Skywarps gun, Primes gun etc) isn’t necessarily the best gun for that character. For instance I found if I gave Ironhide his cannon instead of Prowls that he had been sporting, his stats actually went down! Weird.
Characters: G1 in all it’s brilliance! So many characters included that are generally overlooked like the Deluxe Insecticons, though they tended to not go further than the 86 toyline, with the exception of Overkill and Slugfest. With the Furies Special Episode we get to see Arcee, Chromia,and Elita One make an appearance which is great and we get to see Firestar which is awesome! They have also added a few Post-G1 G1 characters such as Acid Storm, Slipstream and Flamewar (I didn’t even know about Flamewar until I bought the TFPrime toy a couple of months ago then looked up her history) which are welcome editions. Each card comes with their bio which is generally show/tech spec accurate. And with so many more G1 TF characters out there they have plenty of extra characters to include.
Artwork: The artwork in this game to my mind is unbelievably good! In fact it is the main reason I started playing. I think the perfect example is Scavenger in his vehicle mode. Has anyone EVER seen his alt mode drawn a: so realistically and b: so damn good? And you could say the same for even something as simple as Slugfests Cassette mode. Trypticon’s city mode also looks quite good. In their robot mode you get this cool little 3D effect which is usually a limb extended such as Ravages claw or Ironhide’s cannon arm which moves slightly differently to the rest of their body. Interesting to see that a lot of characters got their ‘Generations’ body and alt-mode, Blurr being a prime example because both are sufficiently different to his original ones. Personally I have no problem with this, though some purists may do.
Allies: This is stupid! I have befriended a ton of Ozformers people on mobage and have yet to be able to access one in my allies list in the game. In the end I have started putting complete strangers on my allies list simply so that I can get the points for cheering them on and grab a few extra cards.
Space Bridge: Where you go to get all your rewards – a nice shout out to the TF universe in general.
Special Episodes: Damn did this work on me! I only downloaded the game several days before the latest episode began so I had pretty much level 2 cards and the odd 3. After playing the SE for a week I now have a bunch of great cards. You get lots of rewards, and there is lots of teamwork to beat up the Femmebots who are mostly powerhouses. I got as far as fighting Chromia, never got high enough to give Elita-1 what for. Also makes you try and decide where to spend your battle cube recharges – (will others join in this fight, will I get enough points, what kind of cards will I recieve etc). I got very addicted because I wanted to get the Lvl 4 Slipstream card you receive at 60,000 points as well as at least be in the top 7000 ranking at the end so I could get some good lvl 4 Arcee and Firestar cards.
Buying cards:There are two fields of thought on this. One is ‘Why not, you get great rare cards!’ and the other is ‘No way! That’s how they sucker you!’.
Personally I’m ambivalent to the whole thing. Now I would not buy them, for me the challenge is to find the cards through skill or (mainly) chance, but I don’t begrudge those that do. Since the game itself was free to download, the developer has to make their money somehow because this game definitely would not have cost them nothing to create (artists, programmers etc). And if they make no money, we get no game so I don’t think they are suckering us by offering stuff for us to buy.
Is it a good deal? Depends on your opinion. Creds are $1 = 100 creds. You do get offered a couple of ‘One time only’ deals where you get a rare card for a buck. But in the latest Furies Special Episode they offered “15 Pack: SUPER RARE DECEPTICON GARUNTEED!” for 5000 creds. $50!?!?! No fricken way my friend! Not only are you wasting your money, but you are taking all the challenge out of the game for yourself (and lets face it there is not much challenge to be found otherwise). And anyway, I have gotten 3 super rare cards without spending a cent and have gotten more rare cards than I can fit in my hand. Again, if people want to do this, it is supporting the company that made the game so good luck to them – the only time I find it annoying is when someone challenges you to a battle and it’s obvious they have spent the bucks and are now just pounding on everyone – it’s like a boxer taking steroids then being proud when they bash up someone who just trained normally.
So is the game worth it? Well – it’s free. Again – IT’S FREE! So yeah, it’s worth it. I’ve really been obsessed playing while the Special Episode has been going, I can see becoming less enthused in a day when it’s ended. But the artwork is fantastic, and it’s something you can dip your toe into any time you like so feel free to give it a go :D.
