Pocket Legends Summary / Review
After playing 3 characters over level 30+, I think I'm ready to give up on the game and call it quits because it's getting rather pointless and repetitive with no obvious objective to the game. I have to admit, I have been impressed with the graphics especially on an iPhone/iTouch, and even played on the iPad this is still a very nice game. Overall the experience has been very close to what an MMORPG is like, but in reality the game is nothing more than a 1-5 players hack and slash game with small RPG elements that is played on a handheld device. Before you nay-sayers start bickering about this and the name calling and telling me not to play it if i don't like it, this post is not meant to be a whinning post or to complain or threaten to change the game or I quit kinda thing. I'm merely providing an honest feedback to the developers for their reference in the future develop of this game, or future games to come that hopefully will be nothing but better than PL.
PROS to the game:
- The graphics is awesome, really. It puts the game over the competition and the overall look/feel is quite original.
- Controls is easy to learn, and simple enough to be operated on the iPad/iPod/iPhone devices.
- Thumbs up for the in game help system that's easy to access, making it great for new players to figure out what's going on.
CONS to the game:
- The skill tree is far too simple. It's technically not even a tree, and by level 35 you have almost too many skill points to allocate to the useful ones already and the players face no real choice on how to customize their character. Certain skills are simply... excuse me, but useless.
- The skills are not designed to scale well to expansion. Originally when the level cap was set to.. 20? 25? The number of skill points may make some sense, and some of the stats on the skills work well. But then once you lift to level cap to 35, the numbers don't scale well anymore... like instead of certain skill does 30 to 80 dmg from skill lvl 1-5, the damage should scale to the character stats or level instead of having a fixed number so that the skill will continue to grow along with the character.
- Objective and Depth: The game is not story driven, and not objective driven - making it nothing more than hack and slash, level and collect items game. Endlessly lifting the level cap would continue to maintain some of your loyal customers, but eventually they'll get tired and the number of high level players will taper off over time. In a real RPG, players should be given an important element - CHOICE. Whether it's how they want to customize their character, or how they want to approach a quest, or what path they'd like to take, how they want to allocate their stats, or what they want to do beside hacking and slashing. In PL, there is essentially nothing there but to continue what you do as level one, find/make a game and hack&slash again.
- Bugs: The game is plagued with undisclosed bugs that are not attended to enough. Props to the devs for patching and updating the game impressively often, but then again there apparently hasn't been enough testings done prior to release, and sometimes I wonder if the devs actually play the game to even figure out what's going on? Like I remember the cauldrons in this recent pack were lagging crazy on release due to the particle effects, sure it's patched later... and then there's the single digit damage bug on the crocs, and I can again point out another where there are certain regular mobs in game that take longer to kill than the bosses. I'm hoping they're not by design, and I'll be happier if you tell me it's a bug, 'cause if it is by design then the game is more messed up than I thought.
- Ill-adviced sudden changes: This ain't very common, but the recent change to the drops and suddenly slashing the sell price of our entire inventory to 50% cannot be worse of a sudden change to the game. Right we get more drops, and we may get better loot (or maybe not even?), but we're stuck with more junk to sell and more trash loot to annoy us... and I seriously don't see a point of it at all if regular mobs don't seem to have a chance to drop any forms of rare loot at all if you increase the total number of drops.
- Class imbalance: How easy is it that mages die... their magic skills don't scale with their level/stats, and when they do unleash their AOE magic they'll inevitably die and they don't have in their repertoire to save themselves. I cannot believe how horribly they'll be owned when PVP is released prematurely before this is addressed. Mana shield? Yea that lasts a messy 8 seconds?
- Pathing... need I say more? I continue to get stuck at the ice spikes around the corner... the enemies are way smarter with pathing than my character that would only travel in a straight line.
- Dungeon design is simplistic, and not challenging at all. The stages look different, but plays almost exactly the same. -more in this area next
- Content/Stages: As of right now, any player as long as they purchased the content, can enter any stage at will. All stages within the same campaign shares almost exactly the same difficulty and mobs appear to have the same level. So what's the big deal about any bosses, or the big boss at the final stage when you can pretty much access him every time, and every boss within the same campaign shares the same random loot table? Shouldn't a certain boss contain a certain loot table so that players who want certain loot would have the incentive to continue to play that stage? And maybe instead of allowing players to choose any stage at will, maybe the stages should be linear one way or another so that you have to play through the stages to access the final stage of a campaign, and the final boss is guaranteed to drop at least 1 to 2 pink at least to give players an incentive to play it through?
- Lack of variety in power-ups. As of right now all the equipment has a neglectable + on str/dex/int that does exactly: NOTHING. The only real stats are the dmg / speed on weapons, and the H/S or M/S, to hit % is kinda silly and then the only remaining is crit %. We need a LOT more variety in power-ups... seriously, how about +30 to +50 health? how about health/mana leech? how about elemental effects like 1% chance of slowing down enemy on ice or DOT (damage over time) poison? or +1% chance of root on nature based weapons? + walk speed?
- Sorry I just kind of have to say this game... elemental based anything does nothing. Maybe you could consider making certain mobs invulnerable or highly resist on certain elemental based weapons, then give us a quick toggle on gear sets to give them game much more depth and playability?
- Consumable Items: There are 2 in the game... health and mana potion. You can chuck as many and as quickly as the game would take. Again, no depth at all... there should be different level of potions, and they should have cool down timers to make the game challenging. How about a rez item so that we can all rez just give it a very high price tag and a long cool down?
Overall, again this game has great potentials, and I must congratulate the devs for doing a great job. It's very unfortunate but undeniable that their success is being plagued by the lack of planning and testing. I wholeheartedly wish that they'll find the right path to continue to improve the game and eventually make this a much bigger success than it is. One last thing, believe me, player housing and pvp isn't what the game need the most right now...
