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PGConnects: The Horus Heresy: Legions is taking a swing for Hearthstone's crown

And it might land a pretty solid blow

PGConnects: The Horus Heresy: Legions is taking a swing for Hearthstone's crown

There's an embarrassment of riches on the App Store when it comes to licensed Games Workshop games. But that doesn't mean that there isn't space for another one. Which is good, because I saw two today.

One of them is The Horus Heresy Legions. It's a card game that owes a decent amount to Hearthstone. But it's more than that. Built from the ground up as a mobile game, it's sharper, its play time is shorter, and there's a ferocity to it that fits in with its grim dark grim grim dark future setting.

I only got to play it for a few minutes, but that was enough to get a feel for it. It's a deck-builder, with characters lifted from the Horus Heresy books. If you're not familiar with those, a really bad thing happens and everything gets more awful. There's more to it than that, but it doesn't really matter.

Legions of doom

The game would work if it didn't have the GW branding, but it adds a thuggish stomp to play. There are space marines, there are chaos space marines. There's a lot of fighting. A campaign walks you through some of the battles that made up the conflict. Then there's online play.

That's where the meat of the game is. You can join clans, called Lodges here, and there are events that let you change the content that the game is going to receive. If one side comes at the top of an event leaderboard, then different cards and decks will be available than if the other wins.

There's a lot of good ideas here, and the game gets the feel of the grungy spaceships and war torn planets just right. There's a hefty blob of stragtegy too, with plenty of different cards and potential deck combinations to play with.

Killing time

Legions feels like a game that gets both the platform it's being built for, and the people who are going to be playing it. The addition of GW's rich lore is just the icing on the cake. Even if you're not a fan, the card chucking underneath everything is good enough that it's unlikely it's going to matter.

There are plenty of Games Workshop games on the App Store. But this one feels like it's going to more than earn its place among them.

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.