Previews

MWC 2012: Hands-on with the blood-sucking iPhone and Android MMO Dark Legends

Darkness rising

MWC 2012: Hands-on with the blood-sucking iPhone and Android MMO Dark Legends
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| Dark Legends

Dark Legends represents something of a drastic change in direction for Spacetime Studios. Its previous mobile MMOs – Pocket Legends and Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles - focused on small disconnected level-based group battles (and were very much family-friendly experiences).

With Dark Legends, however - as the name might suggest - the studio has turned to an altogether more menacing subject for its next MMO game: vampires.

The game looks like a big step up visually from previous entries in the series, thanks to the combination of graphical improvements and a more ambitious scope.

Shrouded by darkness

In Dark Legends, you play a vampire - who naturally feeds on the blood of its victims - out to destroy humans that have bandied together to take you down. This overarching story serves to link the various battles together.

The levels are almost exclusively set during the nighttime (naturally), which means the bright white walls of the spaceships in Star Legends are replaced by ominous, dirty old mansions and creeping, rotten crypts.

You no longer pick your character from a selection of classes, but instead use a specialisation tree to choose how your blood sucker will fight.

Sucks to be you

And suck blood you will, because every special attack - be it a charged-up group attack or the unleashing of a swarm of rats - draws its power from your health. After taking down a chain of enemies, though, you're given the option of applying a firm bite to the jugular.

Performing this action not only restores your precious health, but also allows you to steal a special ability depending on the foe you wound.

Some features from earlier Legends games return in this new adventure - blood packs are effectively the same as Star's stimpacks - but the action is faster, more brutal, and more gruesome than the 'shoot and stand' fare that typified the other games.

A lot at stake

On top of the PvE play, Dark Legends will boast a PvP mode, which was sadly not available to see at Mobile World Congress.

The setup of this mode, though, should pique MMO fans' interest. Rather than just plonk characters in an arena, Dark Legends uses team-based competitive modes.

The team playing the zombies on one map (set during the day, but inside a dark mansion), for instance, can use the environment to repel the vampires, pulling back blinds to burn them with the sun's rays.

Dark Legends will be out on Android, iOS, and other formats in a few weeks.
Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).