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I was sure there was a topic on RRU discussing this game but evidently it just doesn't exist. Lego Legacy Heroes Unboxed is a mobile game developed by GameLoft. It was released in early access around August this year in a whole host of strange countries - Denmark, Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand. I think I'm the only active RRUser with access to it. This will be a mess of chronological & overall. I have absolutely no hope of running it on my phone as the game is extremely graphically intensive. However Antithesis on the Discord (don't know your RRU ping, else I'd @ you) suggested running it on the Bluestacks emulator. Huzzah, it works! Me being me, the first thing I do is read over the EULA, T&Cs, and Privacy Policy. Yes, all three. There's some interesting bits in there: there is the potential for User Created Content, which, upon doing so, becomes the property of Gameloft if you send them any suggestions they become Gameloft's ideas but I don't think you came here to read the EULA. By the way, I set up these screenshots with Greenshot. PrntScrn to draw a region, then Shift+PrntScrn to snap that same region. Hit down twice to go to (Save to directory) and ENTER and voila I have saved a screenshot! After a short intro cutscene, the game throws you into it immediately, hopping you straight into a battle. I'll get into the details of battling a little later, but for now you can see it operates on a turn-based battling system. The game then goes back to the main menu. This is a pretty neat 3D menu. Characters you unlock will occasionally walk around, which is cool. You can't move around in this, but you can pan the camera side to side a bit. As you can see it's asking me to Build this Campaign Board. This is pretty underwhelming: Majisto comes up, swishes his wand, and the bricks fountain into a building. I got a picture of the Guilds house (just offscreen) going swoosh. For something labelled "Build" I expected a little more, although TT's "building" minigames in Lego the Hobbit were an absolute chore and I hope never to see them again. So it's probably better this way. Up there on the top left is my profile. Presumably this will be customizable later. However, at the moment the game just rolls you a random three-word name, and you can't select your profile picture. The "12" is my rank. This determines a) progression and also b) the max rank of your heroes. Basically all missions give out XP so leveling up is just a matter of time, nothing difficult. You'll also see standard mobile game fare: coins (used to occasionally buy things, level up characters, and level up abilities. Super easy to get and I haven't worried about them). gems (rare, require paid money or given scantily in missions. I haven't spent any of mine because they're super hard to come by. Can be turned into coins, but not vice versa) energy (otherwise known as stamina in other games. Playing missions costs stamina. It recharges at 1 every 3min which is pretty slow, but you also get it when you level up and from a bundle. So getting more is literally just waiting). The Inbox on the left has a 99% chance of crashing my game, so you will continually see that it complains about unread emails. Anyway, let's hop into the main meat of the game, the Campaigns (or the events) - the battling! As you can see there are a couple of campaigns available. There are three at the moment - the second unlocked when I completed a good deal of the first. Let's click on one! It's kinda cool that the game's levels are tiles on a clearly Lego board. There's occasionally branching missions but no real diversity which sucks. Here you can see who I'll be fighting, as well as loot I get on first clear, as well as some loot I might get as well. Let's hop in! In here I can select a bunch of things: - a SET on the left. This is like a 'team bonus' of sorts. They're EXTREMELY hard to get. - Characters! They're also extremely hard to get, and fortunately this is a battle that accepts any type of character. Other battles are EXPLORER only and I have no team variation there - Guild Ally! Grab a friend from multiplayer. I used up my 3 slots for the day so we'll just have to pass. Total power is measured in Awesomeness, which I find pretty cool. Let's go! ... well, first there's a loading screen. These are pretty, contain useful tips about how the game works, and most of all have this memorable line: Ouch. If it's a campaign mission, we'll get some cutscenes. These can be pretty witty. However if you were hoping for a deep plot like the trailer revealed there... isn't one. Yet, anyway. It's still in Early Access. The lack of a cohesive narrative really sucks. This isn't just in the cutscenes: the enemy parties you'll face just don't make any sense. Castle 2007 king + 2010 Kingdoms princes + Fright Knights Barnabus + 2007 Jester is okay if a mash but why are they fighting alongside skeleton healers and firemen??? Of particular note is that the game really plays up the ex- relationship between Willa and Majisto too much. Random lines like this are quite funny, but every one in three lines just... jars me. There's no voice acting BTW. Just text and some quite nice animations. The introductory animations - in fatc, all the animations - are really well done. Which I didn't snip. Anyway, here's the start of battle: I have some buffs above my character's head thanks to my Set bonus. Minifigures have a ton of stats one of which is speed. This determines how fast the "Pep Meter" fills, which is the blue circle. As you can see, all of mine are nearly fully charge. This character charged first and gets to move. I have three moves: a single shot, a multi-shot that damages everyone, and a stealth buff. As it's turn based I can take as long as I like here, there's no mass-tapping, which is really nice. Then time passes and whoever's pep charges up next to full gets to move, and so on and so on and so on and so on. This means that the turn order isn't totally fixed. There are also moves that can reduce Pep on an enemy opponent, although these are rare. By far my favourite animation is the Hiker's healing spell: Even has its own little jingle he plays Oh, one more thing about battling.... it's, while not gory... ... there's definitely more than a smidgeon of guilt when the game is saying "Look at that low health girl displaying her wounded animation! When you click the ATTACK button, since it's the final character, the game will go into slow mo of her exploding into Lego pieces complete with death sound!" I don't mind bashing skeletons (can do that all day!) or blatant villains but... that's just... a bit.... much. Or maybe I was brought up to "not hit girls" too much. The victory animations are also quite good. We then get all sorts of loot from winning! From left to right: - Gems. Used to buy things. Very rare and to be hoarded. - Character cards. Use to build and Star Up characters. Getting enough to build is okay but Starring Up is super tedious. Character cards overall are extremely rare. - Coins. Used for all sorts of things in such low amounts I'm effectively stockpiling. There are ways to burn them but I haven't bothered with that yet. - XP for yourself. Levelling up your level controls the max rank of your heroes & opens up gameplay opportunities (eg Guilds only open at lvl 12) - XP Scrolls. Used to level up your characters. Haven't ran out of these yet, either. - Somethingsomething Coins. These are literally Coins Mk II, used for a different type of purchase. More useful overall as you can buy character cards with them, which you can't do with regular coins, but can do with gems. Missing: - Any piece of "Gear." This will be covered in a bit. I'll write up more thoughts on the battling in a separate Opinion post down below. Some initial bulletpoints: - You are either overleveled & it's a sweep or underleveled & it's impossible - Extreme potential for highly strategic play and absurd syngery --- This is never executed due to extreme rarity of heroes and sets, as well as even the best strategy can't win if you're underleveled --- Bonus bonus bonus effects (eg: +5% dmg for every debuff on target) - Some abilities are useless - I wish this was a paid PC game, it'd be so much more fun that way - AI is absolutely awful Bonus abilities include: - Taunt. Functions utterly unlike Pokemon "Taunt" and much more like "Follow Me." If you use Taunt, until it's that characters' turn again, it will be the only one targetable by the enemy team. - Stealth. Cannot be targeted unless no other targets are available - Dodge. Less scummy that Pokemon evasion partly because all moves have an innate (90%?) chance to miss anyway. - Heal over Time - Assist. When attacking, other party can chip in and do bonus damage (the amount of bonus damage is specified & variable) - Doing bonus damage if the target has Taunt - Doing bonus damage if hero types are on the field There is an absolute ton of strategic potential but it's not usable due to the mobile game nature. Also, if you got a Gold trophy on a level - which you get if you lose no teammembers in battle (don't worry, they come back for use in the next battle totally fine), if you want to grab the level's loot, you no longer need to actually battle the level. You can just click the button! This really helps speed things up. By the way, the x5 remaining resets every day or so, so you can come back later. So let's try to deck out our team shall we? Well, aside from the fact that - unless you spend insane amounts of gems - character cards are EXTREMELY difficult to come by, the team building is very interesting. In my early campaigning there was no team building to be done. I couldn't even fill the available 5 slots you can bring to battle, because I didn't have enough characters! This really sucks. There are a lot of characters though, and I'm sure they'll be adding more. Here's a character, the starting one and really quite good: As you can see, there are a lot of really interesting strategic stats that all can be modified during battle, and there are more than just stat changes too. Here's how we can buff him: 1) Star Up. The most expensive way. I need 50 character cards to star him up. These are super rare: battles occasionally give you 2 character cards for winning for the first time. And only SOME battles have a a roughly 50% chance of giving ONE card. And collecting 50 character cards will only grant ONE star. Ugh...... 2) Level Up. This uses XP Scrolls and Coins. You can only level up characters to your current maximum level. 3) Gear Up. See those + signs? Each character has a list of 6 items of equippable gear. They all grant minor stat buffs. Filling all six slots allows the character to Gear Up, which bakes the stat bonuses in and clears all the gear slots. This unlocks certain abilities - for instance, the kicking move unlocks at Gear 2. So here's what a little more filled out character looks like: There's a little more to the character system (Basic Pizza II, crafting gear), but that's mostly irrelevant and just waiting for stuff to drop. Oh, one more thing, the shop. I don't use this much because most of the stuff is in gems and those are hard to come by and paid for by real money. But I did discover what the $NZ 169.99 item was! Oh yeah, one more thing. It's a pretty useless feature, but when you build a Set (or a character, but the animation is much shorter) you get an animation of the pieces coming together. Neat, but sets are extremely rare, so it doesn't count for much. Want to find out more? Just watch this person play the game: No commentary, but you'll get a much better feel for what the game looks like, and he's the one who's played it the most. (There are very, very few people YTing this game, which I find a little weird). CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: More information and a 'review' coming soon, but I wanted to get this out here first - The game is fun and enjoyable. I enjoy playing it at the moment because my mental state is significantly damaged, and I'll likely start playing more strategic games soon. But in this significantly weakened state it's fun to play. - The game has a TON, an absolute TON, of strategic potential with the synergy of abilities and sets and stats and buff moves aand... but you can't get any of this at any short notice. - The game is, in its current state, pleasingly playable free. It's merely just a matter of booting up the game, clicking Loot a bunch of times on a level which might drop character cards, and coming back later. - I very much wish this game was a paid PC game with DLC story expansions as then the mobile grinding aspect would go away entirely and the strategy would be so much more suited. - I really wish it was a paid PC game - I really, really, really wish it was a paid PC game. Gameloft, you listening? - Lego strategy games are almost unheard of (only Lego Battles and that was highly obscure) and that, if nothing else, makes this game special. - Have I said I wish it was a paid PC game yet?