Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is a free-to-play RPG in which players build a team of characters from throughout Star Wars history and take them through a series of progressively difficult turn-based battles. Replace “Star Wars” with “DC Comics” in that description and you’ve got DC Legends.
When I previewed DC Legends back in July of last year, it wasn’t quite the same thing as Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Battles were more dynamic, collecting new characters was more straightforward and the narrative was presented differently. Now that the game is finally available in North America on iOS and Android, it’s obvious WB Games took some cues from EA’s popular Star Wars character collection RPG.
Characters are collected via shards rather than full-on unlocks, so purchasing a pack from the extensive in-game store is more likely to grant you progress towards unlocking or upgrading a character rather than he character itself.
They’ve done away with the original card-based item unlocking system in favor of a more generic gathering of items and elements. Experience points must be applied to characters between battles instead of being earned outright. Skills are upgraded manually using resources. Each character has six equipment slots that must be filled to progress to the next equipment tier. It’s very Galaxy of Heroes.
The battles look like Galaxy of Heroes battles. Skill icons, originally laid out along the bottom of the screen, have been pushed into the lower right hand corner, where they are in its Star Wars counterpart.
From special events that grant specific resources to the PVP battles and ranking system, it really is uncanny how much this new game resembles EA’s successful game. The main difference is that while Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is presented without narrative—it’s supposed to be a game that Star Wars characters play in a cantina—DC Legends features a storyline in the same vein as the now-defunct Avengers Alliance games.
It’s about Black Lanterns and shadowy copies of established characters. The Manhunters (an ancient race of assholes) are somehow involved. Corny dialogue is bandied about as players slowly uncover the mystery.
Otherwise it’s all very derivative. That said, it’s derivative of a game I played obsessively for months, so maybe that’s not a bad thing.
DC Legends is now available as a free download for iOS and Android.