RAID: Shadow Legends

Game overview

RAID: Shadow Legends is a free to play fantasy MMO with strong RPG elements. Developed by Plarium, it puts players in control of their party of hero characters in combat.

At the game's core is the PvE progression in which you'll embark on story campaigns, dungeons and faction wars in order to level up your heroes and give them better gear.
Combat is turn-based, complex enough to keep it stimulating on the long run, but also easy to grasp for beginners.

You'll recruit new heroes over time (there are hundreds of them!), each one with its own strenghts and weaknesses that can be enhanched\mitigated through the use of artifacts, potions, glyphs and other items.
Only those who will understand how to maximize the potential of their champions will be able to climb the rankings in the PvP arena, the ultimate objective for the advanced player.

RAID features very good visuals: all of the in-game artworks (characters, locations, items, etc..) are beautiful, and this contributes a lot to the lore and atmosphere of the game.

Overall, RAID is a very good and fun MMORPG.
Plarium was known for making top-notch, though ordinary, strategy browser-games... with RAID, they markedly upped their ambitions. While it does feature some of the mechanics typical of the company's browser-based titles (like the Bastion to grow your hub), its core lies in the brand-new RPG elements of turn-based combat and heroes collection, which is where the real fun begins for MMORPG lovers.

➔ Main points:

• Free to play party-based MMORPG that's fun and visually pleasing.
• Hundreds of unique hero characters with individual skills and combat animations.
• A combination of strategy and RPG turn-based combat mechanics.
• Extremely popular title with active playerbase (also on mobile platforms).
• Simple for beginners, but can become really tactical for hardcore gamers.

Full review

About RAID

Your hero characters are the heart and soul of the game, so keep them leveled and geared!

Made by Plarium, RAID: Shadow Legends (RAID) is a PC and mobile fantasy MMO in which players control a squad of heroes, utilizing their skills and equipment to come out on top in PvE and PvP.

The game is free to play with optional in-game purchases, and features gameplay features that are both familiar to players of other Plarium games from the strategy genre, plus new ones in the form of turn-based 3D RPG combat.

The game starts of with a short and sweet tutorial that shows off its lore and world building, plus introduces you to the party turn-based combat mechanics, and at the end you will get to pick your first hero character from a rare pool of four. Make your choice wisely here.

Building A Winning Roster

In RAID, the core objective of the game is to grow your roster of characters.
The game has over two hundred characters consisting of different races - each with unique skills, looks and combat animations - and that's pretty impressive.
You'll start with a few free heroes given to you at the starting rank of level 1, and must play through the game's content in order to level them up, acquire equipment to bolster their stats, and ultimately max-rank them all to tackle the harder content like Dungeons and Arena PvP for the best rewards available.

Boss fights are brutal and you'll need to make sure your party is ready.

RAID consists of two main gameplay modes, which are the Bastion HUB mode and the party combat mode.

In Bastion, you are in charge of building your main HUB or city, by unlocking beneficial buildings the more you play and level up your account. For example, at level 6, you'll get access to the Tavern which can be used to sacrifice unneeded hero characters to power up another. Bastion will feel familiar, progression-wise, if you've ever played any strategy games released by Plarium.

On the other hand, any content that you participate in, from story campaigns to dungeons will put you in RAID's party combat mode.
Here, you'll need to spend Stamina which replenishes over time to tackle increasing levels of difficulty against the AI hero characters, in which you can control your heroes in combat manually or use the auto-play function (which isn't recommended if you want to be efficient).

Story campaigns, dungeons and the PvP Arena are all important to build a winning roster of heroes as they drop crucial materials like Shards and gear that let you recruit more heroes and power up your existing roster.
This makes up 90% of the gameplay in RAID.

Combat itself is fun up until you start getting into the higher difficulty content, which requires a full team of five heroes.
If you haven't gone back to re-play early levels and using up precious Stamina, you'll find some heroes in your roster being very under-leveled which could cause repetitive gameplay due to the need to grind out levels and gear just to progress. The auto-play function, in these cases, comes pretty handy.

PvP Arena and Faction Wars rounds up to the content, and while they are fun, it can be painful if you don't share the same spending power with your opponent, who has managed to get the highest rarity heroes and gear by spending real money in the cash shop.
There's some imbalanced matchmaking to be had, but overall there's plenty to do in RAID which should keep you occupied.

Picking Your Battles Wisely

One aspect of gameplay that players need to take into consideration early on in the game for progression is where to spend your limited Stamina to get the most out of your hero characters.

At the beginning, only the story campaign mode is available, and you should run that as much as you can to ensure that your chosen roster are at a decent level of 10 and above before continuing.
This is to make sure that if you do dabble in Dungeon content, your characters have enough stats and gear to tackle the final boss in dungeons. Boss fights are pretty hard and it's easy to die and miss out on the loot, wasting precious Stamina in the process.

It's also good to know and remember RAID's primary combat mechanic which is the strength and weakness system known as Affinity.
Each hero class comes in one of three Affinities. They are Magic, Spirit and Force.
Magic is strong against Spirit, Spirit is strong against Force, and Force is strong against Magic.
The fourth Affinity is Void, and it has no strength or weaknesses but they only appear on the rarest of heroes, meaning they'll be super hard to obtain.
Otherwise, most of the content you'll do in RAID awards sufficient currency to upgrade gear and can occasionally drop Shards and Gems needed to obtain new heroes.

Look and Feel

Bastion is the main HUB and you'll unlock new features as you level.

Plarium is known for releasing strategy browser games that, although very nice within their category, still show the limits of browser-based titles. RAID is the exception.
First of all, it has its own game client to download. Also, the game features very good graphics in each area.
Where the visuals really shine is in the combat department, where you get to watch your heroes execute their skills and abilities in real time - and that's really satisfying! But also the artworks used for the storytelling, the heroes' design, their close-ups, even the game interface are all well produced.

The PvE campaigns are well produced too: the story is cool and the voice acting will help you to make you feel inside the magical world of Teleria. Even if RAID doesn't have the immersivity of a traditional, first-person, open-world MMORPG, the cool story and voice acting guarantee hours of entertainment also to single-players.

Due to the nature of RAID being a multi-platform MMO that can run on both PC and smartphones, the system requirements aren't very high, which means it's highly accessible to players across the board.

The only downside is the combat music that unfortunately plays on loop, and it's the same one or two tracks that you'll feel like muting after hearing it for the hundredth time in a row.

Is It Pay to Win?

It depends. Everything in the game can be unlocked without paying a single cent, but as you can imagine the best heroes and gears will require a huge amount of grinding that you can avoid only with real-life money.
Now the question is: do you really need these items?

If you want to climb the PvP ranks to the very top: yes you do... so you'd better start saving money, or prepare yourself to grind a lot.
If you only want to enjoy the PvE content, join a good clan, win some battles in the arena (and even get good ranks, but without super duper top ambitions): no, you don't need a huge amount of premium items, and what you unlock by playing normally will be more than enough.

After all, RAID can be enjoyed primarily for the solo PvE content, and in this case the most unpleasant thing you'll encounter is that every once in a while, the game pushes popups that fills the screen with cash store advertisements.
That comes across as overbearing indeed, and that's due to the frequency of how often these things happen.
The good news is that you can disable these notifications from the options menu - although many people don't know it.

(on a side-note: if you actually plan to spend real money on RAID, it's indeed advisable to do so at the beginning to buy Sacred Shards and summon Epic\Legendary heroes since the beginning to fully enjoy the newbie-user boosts).

Long story short: items in there are definitely advantageous, but you can play the game perfectly fine without spending a single cent.

Is It Worth Playing?

RAID is Plarium's latest foray into the RPG world and the game is pretty popular right now, also on the Google Playstore and iOS Appstore.
The easy-to-grasp gameplay and addictive nature of watching your favorite hero characters grow in strength and perform well in combat over time are what makes it fun, and it's definitely worth a try if you enjoy party based RPGs that caters to both PvE and PvP modes.

Its free to play model is generous enough to go far in due time, but the cash store can leave a sour taste in the mouth if you're easily aggrieved by things that offers gameplay advantages for money (you shouldn't be playing any free-to-play game in this case though).

Overall, a very good addition to the world of MMORPGs, spiced up with some original ideas taken from Plarium's previous experience. Highly suggested.