Preview: MAGIC: LEGENDS Didn't Put a Spell on Me...Yet
Magic: The Gathering has always been associated with heavy strategy, physical card packs and intense tournaments, but not anymore! Magic: Legends is an MMO Action RPG set in the Magic: The Gathering universe that shares the deck building of the card game with the action and loot hunting of a Diablo game. As of now they have put out a public beta for anybody to try, and these are our thoughts.
While the aesthetics might change a bit in the future, there isn’t much to talk about other than they’re a little bland, but passable. And the story isn’t overwhelmingly engaging, but it could be in the full release later this year. Instead I’m going to focus mainly on the two major elements of gameplay, the action RPG gameplay and the deck building.
The main part of the game will be spent running around with a bird’s-eye view, shooting enemies or hitting them with physical attacks that include basic attacks, skills on cool downs and cards from your deck. The actual movement and battling is…fine. At this point in the world of video games, it’s hard to expect a game like this that isn’t formatted like a twin stick shooter. Walking with one joystick and pointing the other joystick feel natural, fluid and allows for intense action. Even on a mouse and keyboard, walking with WASD and pointing with the mouse like a 3rd person RPG or just clicking in the direction you want your character like LoL feels better than Magic: Legends. Instead, this game decides that your character will face in the direction that you click or walk all the time, making it feel archaic, and it just didn’t sit right with me personally. This could be a very subjective notion, but I feel like I always had to run away a couple of steps (or I would be attacked by a slew of enemies) and then turn around and attack instead of just walking backwards and attacking. This may not bother people, especially if they are used to playing more games like this. But even after players get used to the controls, it still moves and acts very clunky and feels poorly programmed because of it. After addressing all that, the rest of the aspects of targeting enemies, seeing enemies and the cool spells in battle were all above average.
Where Magic: Legends shines is in this aspect of deck building. As players play through the game, they unlock a variety of cards from the physical card game and then can create a deck to their specific liking. When in battle, players will have the ability to randomly “draw“ these cards and use them as attacks. As of now, only a few of the spells out of the many in your deck will appear, so this keeps things fresh and chaotic because you can’t quite count on anyone card at any given moment. I think this is a great integration of the physical game. My only concern is that because players don’t have complete control of their characters abilities at any given moment in a fight, specific strategies and set ups of different buffs, debuffs, and spells take away a bit of the strategy that you would find in something like World of Warcraft or Diablo. It is a very interesting and fun system, but it might end up being a hindrance in higher level gameplay when you want and need better control of your abilities.
The biggest thing that I have to say about Magic: Legends is that players need to try it themselves. It’s free and a little confusing to access initially, but once it starts, there are many hours of content to work through. I personally thought the deck building added a great flavor and connected well to the original card game, but the moment to moment gameplay felt a little clunky and awkward. Let us know what you think in the comments and if you’re interested in its full release later this year!