The Legend of Evil: a tower defense/offense game where you have to destroy a main building of the enemies while protecting your own. You make towers by spending soul, which in turn you get from having towers and by killing enemies. There are currently two game modes: campaign and rogue. Although the game has a lot of potential, I currently cannot recommend buying this game. Here's why.The Legend of Evil: a tower defense/offense game where you have to destroy a main building of the enemies while protecting your own. You make towers by spending soul, which in turn you get from having towers and by killing enemies. There are currently two game modes: campaign and rogue. Although the game has a lot of potential, I currently cannot recommend buying this game. Here's why.
Let's start with the good aspects: the game is very beautiful. Landscapes are nicely designed and monsters and their variations are quite creative and fun. The devs put a lot of effort in creating an ambiance and lore for the game; virtually every enemy or object in the game is "explorable" (using X), which adds an entry to the lorebook. I read some of the descriptions and they seemed rich enough for this type of game, which is a nice bonus. In rogue mode you have some freedom to spend coins in upgrading and customizing your monsters any way you want, and every upgrade you give to a specific creature will slightly randomize its appearance, which I thought was a very nice detail.
Now, the reasons why despite this, I can't recommend the game at its current stage...
First of all, the game mechanics are not polished at all. The game is VERY unbalanced. In campaign mode, there is no difficulty scaling, it just suddenly becomes very harsh by level 5 on. The difficulty resides in the fact that the devs seem to have devised practically a unique way to beat each level, which makes this game less of a tower defense/offense and more of a puzzle game with very unclear boundaries of what or when you should do things. This hinders creative approaches or favoring your preferred towers. Strategy involves removing towers and replacing them with other towers at specific moments of the level, failure to do so will lead to losing the level and having to start over. On top of that, devs added a timer mechanic which adds to the frustration; often I found myself finding a way to beat the enemies, but then running out of time and having to start over. The timer window is relentless; a single mistake or mistiming of replacing a tower for another or doing a specific upgrade at a given time will cost you the level. This makes the game frustrating and unappealing for replaying, as there don't seem to be alternative strategies that you can try out to beat levels. I kept replaying because I was hoping I didn't understand properly a mechanic in the game, or hadn't realized something obvious that made the game fun instead of frustrating, but unfortunately there was nothing else to it.
The rogue mode turned out to be more playable and fun, but it is still unbalanced. After beating each level, you get 400 coins to spend in upgrades that will carry on for the rest of the 8-level rogue mini campaign. There are many options for upgrades, although some of them seem to be way more powerful than others, which makes unreasonable prices of some of them a bit unappealing. If I play this game again soon, I will try to unlock that creature that costs 1250 souls to summon, although with the combination of harsh waves of enemies plus the timer, I don't see how or when I'll be able to save that many souls in a run.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong? But, I believe beauty of tower defense/offense games is that, when they're duly balanced, there's really no wrong way to go; you can choose whatever towers and upgrades fit your playstyle. That feeling is missing in The Legend of Evil.
Balancing this type of games is definitely not an easy task, but I really hope the devs do their best effort, because the game concept and graphics may be worth it. I wouldn't know myself how to balance the game, but here are some pointers/suggestions for the devs, in case they're reading this:
1) Get rid of the timer. The game is tough as it is, no need to make it more frustrating. Maybe the timer can be there just for the challenges, but not as a win/lose condition. This would allow creative approaches (resistance builds, for example).
2) If you want to keep waves as tough as they are, maybe consider significantly raising the HP of the main defense building. This allows to strategize a bit more letting some guys hit you.
3) If you're going to make humans stay and continue hitting the defense building if they make it through, the allow to have any way to defend the crystal! As of now, monsters can't attack humans behind them, so basically even if a pilgrim makes it through, you're done with (and since the crystal has so few HP, probably done in 2 or 3 hits). Alternatively, make humans that attack the crystal walk past it, or get instantly killed by the crystal. This gives hopes of still succeeding if you made a mistake or let one through.
4) Maybe a rogue/unlimited wave survival mode where you just have to fend off incoming waves of increasing difficulty?
5) Proper tutorial, ability to spend coins in campaign mode, or other rewards from digging.
Hope this helps… Expand
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