BLUF: Nearly instantly forgettable ARPG, with cringe inducing voice acting, zero story engagement, but a good solid MtG feel. Overall, there doesn't feel like any driving force behind your magical foray into the planes, and the arpg loot gameplay loop will leave you cold.
Engine / Graphics: 7/10
The Cryptic engine is getting old, but is put to decent use, here, with WASD movementBLUF: Nearly instantly forgettable ARPG, with cringe inducing voice acting, zero story engagement, but a good solid MtG feel. Overall, there doesn't feel like any driving force behind your magical foray into the planes, and the arpg loot gameplay loop will leave you cold.
Engine / Graphics: 7/10
The Cryptic engine is getting old, but is put to decent use, here, with WASD movement control, and decent area graphics. If you've played Neverwinter, the controls will immediately feel familiar. On my old i7-7800 and 1080ti, I was easily keeping 60-90 fps at 1080p, but far less near 2 or 4k. I have heard that some areas' speed are controlled by netcode, and bandwidth, so I am unable to limit-test that on my Fiber. Unless in a co-op zone with 30 summons, I was nearly always near 60fps.
Music and World Sounds: 6/10
Sound was instantly as forgettable as the game is overall. Not bad, not amazing. Nothing stands out, but neither does anything annoy, except the "ping" sound, which was terrible, and recently patched to sound less grating. You won't feel like you HEAR the scuttling of your spider horde... but neither do you want to immediately tear down your speakers.
Story and Voice acting: 2/10
...... sigh. Such a waste of an IP tie-in.
Each area has its own individual "story arc" except the intro that rolls into the story arc for the green woods area. Each of these is beyond forgettable, boring, trite, and worst, fully voiced by actors that ... give negative impact to the scene. You are pushed around linearly through some basic grade school writing on each plane, with thankfully the ability to skip scenes, and voice. Some "call outs" from NPCs are so comically overacted to the point of annoyance, or ridiculousness that you'll want to mute voices.
The awful story is simply bad, but you can at least skip it all to get to more meh ARPG gameplay... however...
Whomever directed and/or QA'd the voice acting should be fired. Just... fired. and Blacklisted. No one should be subject to this level of ... unforgivable lack of imagination and care.
Gameplay: ARPG engine and actual abilities, 6/10,
The classes consist of an at-will attack, and 2 static cooldowns, while you can choose your 12 card deck building, but you only draw 4 spells at a time, and in random order, so 1-4, or your buttons can be any spell. Subjectively, I enjoyed some of the game mechanics at their lowest level, although most felt that they lacked weight behind them. Deck building seemed to be where the choices shined, but it was locked behind groan worthy story, and worse-than forgettable characters. You'll be locked into your first class for a good 26+ hours, and its default deck for perhaps 10 hours, so chose wisely. After which your one character CAN do it all, but due to loot limitations, you'll find it's best to focus.
Gameplay part 2: Loot and game-play loop: 1/10
Why do we even get games designed this shoddily? Who released this TRASH, and thought, "Damn I'm proud of this." This is NOT a diablo-like where you'll pick up a purple or orange that's the perfect fit for you, and you open your backpack with JOY to inspect your newfound treasure. This is a F2P that shoves a poorly designed cash-shop-gate slowdown-mechanic into your power-spike desire. All the loot except new cards are trash drops, which you meld into a heap of power to upgrade a meh item once. Instead of the tried and beloved way of pre-fix and post-fix random generated loot, Magic: Legends has standardized loot, so that many copies of an item are required to upgrade the power of each single static item. Also, cards and card "shards" are random drops, requiring many shards to power up your abilities. So many recent F2Ps get their Loot and Gameplay loops exactly wrong in an effort to funnel cash shop transactions. People will WILLINGLY spend on good games, and trying to force them into it generally leaves them dropping ZEROs on your game on a review site. This game gets loot, and the primary gameplay loop... exactly and totally wrong. You will hate this part of the game.
Quests and Online Play - 7/10
The game is "Always online," as it's designed as a semi-open, many-multiplayer, zone-based Diablo-like. Netcode wasn't awful, and despite a few hiccups, most 3 man instances were fine, if wholly repetitive. I did come across one static bug where I couldn't interact with an item to move forwards in a story quest. World chat is worse than WoW barrens, or twitch streams, so do yourself a favor and use the command
/channelleave zone
as soon as you're in an open area. This resets each time you plainswalk.
Zone chat was completely broken for a while in week 1, and that felt as if it were for the best.
It's no where near as bad as most of these reviews. However, it's also not even "good" by any means. As it's F2P, might as well give it a go. Do be warned, It's unlikely to be worth your time.… Expand
Magic: LegendsYour Score0 out of 10User Score
