DC: Dark Legion has been out since the middle of March and I played it a couple of weeks after the game was released. It’s been a little over 1 month since I started playing and if I’m being honest, I probably have 1-2 weeks left in me before I put this down for good.
Dark Legion is a very decent mobile game and it has heaps of potential but the issue is, that potential isn’t being realized or it is but it’s too far off for me to stick with.
Within this article, I am going to outline the things I do like and the things that I don’t to give you a proper rundown of what this game feels like playing it every day for over a month. After all, these gacha-style mobile games are designed to last you for years but whether or not they remain consistent is another story.
This isn’t to throw any shade on the developers either, I think they have a good foundation to build on. This is just my own thoughts with the game and of my own opinions.
What I do like about the game
1. Variety of gameplay
There’s a ton of stuff to do for the most part. Not of all it is good of course but there are some decent modes in there. Meta brawl is fun where you get to attack others in an arena-styled mode. There’s the training simulator which brings an element of satisfaction to it where you build your team up over time. The training simulator recently added rewards for every 100 rounds you beat which is a reasonable start but this mode needs more, especially on the side missions where you can only use specific teams.
The story missions were fun but didn’t last long, the patrol is a nice touch and the missions after every war room upgrade are decent as well.
By far the most fun mode is the darkest timeline. It’s like a tower mode but you begin with very little and you build up as you progress. It allows you to try out teams you don’t have built up yourself and the rewards are semi-decent as well. The only issue is that it’s only once per week you get to play through it. Once your attempts are up that’s it. They did today add 2 more difficulty tiers with new missions meaning the challenge only amps up, I’m a little gutted they added these in mid-week without giving us some extra attempts considering the 5 attempts you get refresh on a Monday.
*Note to devs: if you’re reading, PLEASE stop hiding the fact some of the battles are character types only. I’ve been burned too many times and it means I’m losing a very valuable attempt.
2. Satisfaction
The game does sometimes give you that satisfaction. It’s rare but it can happen. When you do eventually pull shards from the bleed, for example, it’s a nice feeling but it doesn’t happen often. In a nutshell, the game CAN feel satisfying. I think for me the most satisfying aspect is when you finally get a character to 5 white stars, unlocking all of their abilities. It’s nice to see how much of a difference it makes in battle.
3. Servers
When you play the game you’ll be assigned a server. You may or may not be on the same server as your friend if they also play the game. It means you have to start the game, and then create an entirely new character to be able to choose the server to play on. This can be a bad thing for that reason. The simple way to fix this would be to allow players the opportunity to choose their server when creating a character.
Where this is a good thing is because of the beta, there are leagues with huge power that are weeks ahead. Having servers, means I have a better chance of obtaining top rewards from specific events within the game. It’s an objective one of course but I’m on the latter when it comes to this point.
I have met some fantastic players on my server because it’s more close-knit. I have my league within the server which is top 5. The top league in my server which is 307 is called Wruce Bayne and they go out of their way to help out other leagues and other players. It’s a great group and the community is decent as well. There’s the odd bad egg here and there but ultimately, I’ve liked this side of it.
Unfortunately, though, that’s my main likes. I’ve got a lot more I dislike than I like which is why I can’t see myself playing the game much longer than I have. 1 month in and it’s already feeling like a chore. I played Marvel Strike Force daily for 3 and a half years, I’ve currently been playing Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes for 2 years and still enjoying it. I played WWE Supercard for 18 months. I played DC Legends for 2 years. These are games that didn’t always have the best runs on mobile but ultimately I don’t see myself reaching these sorts of timescales. Of course, I love gacha-style mobile games. I play mainly on console but I do enjoy having a mobile game to sink my teeth into.
What I dislike about the game
1. Infrequency of character shards
Criminally, there are only 50 characters in the game. This is a DC game, a universe filled with thousands of characters. 10 of these consist of random epic characters, 10 are legendary characters and 30 are mythics. The epic characters don’t have shards. Legendary shards are easy to come by but ultimately ridiculously weaker compared to mythic characters. It’s the mythic shards that matter but they’re so infrequent and random as well. Overall, this is the most frustrating part of the game. Scarecrow recently came out and people pop a +10 on the bleed and get the character pull twice. You’re guaranteed a mythic pull after 50 draws but it always feels like I get down to the full 49 pulls before being guaranteed. It’s frustrating and it quite frankly irritates me.
2. Dumb paywalls
In other gacha games I’ve played, we often see a new character being locked behind a paywall but eventually, that character will become free-to-play friendly. Green Lantern being locked purely behind a paywall unless you get the pre-registration bonus is a completely idiotic way to entice people to play and even spend. It will cost easily hundreds to get Green Lantern viable. Great job, developers.
Some of the other hilarious paywalls are recently the new league train event. You simply add people to a train, let it go on a journey, and get some less-than-mediocre rewards from it. The train goes on its journey for several hours and then you have to wait until the following day to send a new train out. They added an offer of a small amount of £99.99 to summon a train instantly. The rewards from it aren’t even worth pretty much £100. An utter joke and disrespectful above all else. That offer should be £1 at most.
The Easter event they put on was distasteful. A dice-rolling event that’s been seen in other games such as Archero 2. At least that game’s a bit more friendly for it. It took over 500 dice to get the magic eye offers and free-to-play players only got 15 in total across the entire event. Again, it’s disrespectful to the players and doesn’t add any sort of feel-good to those players. I know these games cater to the whales. I know that. However, without free-to-play players, whales will only have each other to whale against and then they eventually get bored. Free-to-play players are just as important to these games as they rack up the numbers and can sometimes turn into spenders. Having an event like this felt like a massive slap to the face.
3. Pointless resources
In any mobile game, there are often resources that are harder to obtain and some that you gain far too much of. It’s happened in every game I’ve played but this game has a focus on dollars which are used for next to nothing. I have $300m and counting, the stuff you can buy in the store with it is so very little that it’s a pointless resource. They need to do something with this otherwise it’s going to build into stupid numbers.
They have an entire “shelter” dedicated to growing a civilian population. It’s a pointless aspect of the game. It adds nothing. Again, it’s something that needs adjusted because the only thing it truly offers is dollars which as I’ve already indicated is a pointless resource.
4. Rewards
The only modes I feel like I’m being rewarded well for are the darkest timeline and the missions when you level up a war room. The rest of it leaves a lot to be desired. There are umbral rifts that require your entire league to be active for 40 minutes, the rewards are trash. The guardian events are trash. The entire league’s rewards are awful. I’ve never once felt properly rewarded or excited except the first time I played the darkest timeline. There’s nothing to be excited about. Oftentimes, when other games put on events, they offer a lot of free stuff to get you excited – to keep you hooked. This game has done that only once to me when the darkest timeline first opened up at war room 15. It’s never done it since.
5. Once you build one team, good luck
Once you begin dumping resources into your main 5 characters, good luck building anybody else. The force portion of the character leveling/building is so scarce it makes it almost impossible to focus on other characters or teams because the shards are so infrequent and the materials to upgrade characters are the same. It makes the game boring. I’m currently using a Justice League team with Superman, Batman, Shazam, The Flash, and Green Lantern and I’m so unbelievably bored of using them. I do have loads of other characters unlocked such as Poison Ivy, Joker, Bane, and more that I’d love to use but I simply can’t because I need to focus my resources on the characters I’ve spent building and focusing on already.
6. The Bleed
An utterly incompetent way of releasing characters. The developers have a calendar of upcoming new characters all being released by the same way. It’s unoriginal. You could be looking at using 150 anvil fragments if you have my luck just to unlock the character. Not to mention they keep releasing new ones every 2 weeks, not giving players a proper chance to catch up. I’m sure there’s other ways to release a character. Maybe doing 1 in The Bleed for a month and adding an event for another character. Either that or they need to make the fragments slightly easier to come by. It’s a gambling mchanic above all else and there’s nothing worse when you do finally pull a red and it’s a character you never use, such as Robin.
I understand that I’ve threw a lot of shade on the game. It has potential, I’m not denying that. I just think there’s still a long way to go to make this game truly fun and viable for players long term. Maybe if the rewards are scaled and adjusted, the offers a little less predatory and shards being a little easier to come by then I’ll stick with it. For now though, as I’ve indicated, it won’t be long before I put this game down.
