War of Legends - Review

http://www.waroflegends.com/

It’s true to say there are a mass of free games out there of the MMORTS genre, but trying to sift through them to find good ones can prove to be a bit tough. The problem is that they all follow pretty much the same setup, aims, objectives, and more importantly, the same strategy, so in essence you’re playing the same game, but the graphics and setting are different. My tip of the day for all of these games is simply this: If the game has heroes in it, victory will boil down to who has the biggest, toughest and scariest hero.

So what about War of Legends? What is it? What makes it stand out from say the likes of Castle of Heroes, Evony, Lords or Seventh Dragon? The truth is, not a lot, but the little things do mount up, enough to put it ahead.

War of Legends (WoL) has an Ancient Chinese mythological setting, which is hardly surprising as it has been developed by Chinese firm Ultizen (also responsible for Runescape HD), and subsequently published by the more familiar British company, Jagex. The aim of the game is simple, build your empire, raise an army, develop the best heroes (in War of Legends these are known as Legends) and beat everyone else either on your own or in an “alliance”. Sound familiar? Of course it does, along with Evony, Lords, Castle of Heroes, 7^th Dragon and pretty much any other Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy game out there (MMORTS).

When you sign up you’re given the chance to choose your first Legend, who will effectively be your avatar. The choices are Warrior, Seer or Monk. The warrior inspires his troops to do more damage (using the attribute, “Courage”), the Seer has the ability to carry vast amounts of troops (using the attribute, “Strategy”) whilst the Monk makes for a very good Governor of your city (using the attribute, “Magic”). One thing that is a must when selecting your legends is that they have a high “Ability” score (Ab), and the reason for this is because when they level up, they have the potential to get more points to spend on upgrading their attributes. Early on in the game it won’t be immediately obvious why this is so important, but as your legends level up 2 or 3 times, then you will notice a huge difference. As stated before, a lot of these games come down to has the biggest hero leading their armies. You get to equip your legend with various armour and weaponary as you progress, as well as giving them a mount to enhance their abilities further. The artwork for the heroes is very good, and more importantly, original, unlike one of War of Legends’ rivals who basically “borrowed” some artwork off other games.

Your Legends can also have troops assigned to them (of one type), and there are four different types, Halberdiers, Swordsmen, Archers, and Charioteers. Each unit can be used to counter another, for example, Swordsmen are very good at delivering high amounts of damage against Archers, provided you have enough of them to get to them, and so on. Your Legend also has the ability to influence the battle with the level of their attributes, or items equipped, and these will have to develop as you want to attack either other players or computer controlled “wildlands”. The battles themselves are worked out for you, leaving you with the choice of who you want to fight each round. As a note when you see screenshots of War of Legends, in particular the ones of the battles, don’t be fooled into thinking that these are all lovingly animated with lots of action. Instead they’ll be a few shimmery things, the screen might shake a little, and that’s pretty much about it! Having said that, it’s still prettier then a lot of competing games that you can find out there.

If you are unfamiliar with this genre of game the interface may seem a little bit confusing at times, and some of the rather loose Chinese to English “translations” may take a bit of lateral thought to work out exactly what they mean, but with a nice concise tutorial, and tasks set that help you along almost step by step, things do start to make sense fairly quickly. The graphics that represent your city are quite pretty, but again, not always obvious (although answering the question of just how do you make it obvious what each building is, can lead to rather grotesque graphics that look just plain stupid), and the global map works well visually too.

War of Legends also has a fairly slick and easy inbuilt chat sytem too, which can be switched between Global (everything), World (no system messages), Alliance, Private, System and Info. What I also like is that there is a button there to report any abuse that happens in the game. Admittedly that button itself could be subject to abuse, but from what I’ve seen there seems to be a little more maturity amongst the players of WoL, and that could be down to the way Jagex have gone about advertising it (because let’s be honest, one of their competitors advertising strategies was rightfully heavily criticised for it’s rather offensive crass nature).

The real winner for this game though is that although it uses “Flash”, the coding appears to have been optimised far more efficiently. I’ve noticed with quite a few other games in this genre that they have a tendency to grind your computers memory into dust, with the game ending up looking like a slideshow. Fortunately not so with WoL, and you’ll also be pleased to hear that it all plays in your browser, so no need for a hefty download and install.

And we come to the final point, micropayments. Understandably companies do need to make money, and War of Legends is no exception, and to get that income pretty much most if not all MMORTS' offer micropayments where players can buy extras that give them an advantage, or if they have a job, catch up with those who spend a lot more time on it. Fair to say that War of Legend “Cash" (aka WoLCash) gives players a substantial advantage. If you're wondering, no I don't pay for these types of online game, and the reason for that is because I would just get too mad if someone took out my Empire that actually cost real money to build!

On the whole I think War of Legends is amongst the top games of this type, it's smooth, not a lot of server down time, and it's player base seems to be a bit smaller then say that of Evony, which means that should you join late in the game, you don't get smashed into oblivion in the first 2 weeks. The pace of the game is a bit slower then others but if you have to go to school / college / work, that might actually work in your favour. Well worth having a go at if empire building and crushing your enemies is your sort of thing!