Sacred Legends review - Can the PC RPG make the transition to mobile?
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iOS
| Sacred Legends

Bringing a console franchise to mobile is no mean feat, particularly if your game is designed to be played with a million different buttons and configurations.

A clever developer won't try and replicate the game like-for-like on a smaller device, and will instead take the look and feel of the game and make something new with it.

And it's clear that a clever developer had its hands on Sacred Legends, a mobile adaptation of the RPG series, because it is nothing like its predecessors.

A fresh approach

Instead of trying to be a deep RPG, or even a hack-and-slash title like the last in the Sacred trilogy, Sacred Legends is more of a battler.

Yes, your character enters dungeons to beat up monsters, and you can pick up loot to kit them out with and make slicing up nasties that bit easier.

But you don't actually have any direct control over your character, and instead watch them run from one side of the screen to the other, occasionally pressing a button to activate a special ability.

And that may sound dull written down, but it's actually a very smart move. It's all the key elements of an RPG – fighting, looting, levelling up – but without fiddly controls to muddy things up.

There's a massive campaign to battle your way through, with tons of enemies for you to eviscerate as you go on a largely nonsensical quest to save the world.

That familiar feeling

And once you reach a certain level, you can return to earlier levels to take them on at a higher difficulty, and earn yourself even better loot.

Gear can also be crafted and enhanced by sacrificing lesser weapons and pieces of armour, and there's all sorts of daily quests and missions to do to keep you busy.

The trouble is, all of this is a little familiar. Anyone who played Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes will feel right at home, albeit with only one hero to fight with instead of five.

Indeed, the only thing that's missing is any kind of party outside of bringing in randomly chosen allies, meaning that you're kind of stuck with your starter hero forever.

And while that's not a bad thing per se, you might grow tired of your character busting out the same few moves over and over again.

Stuff of legends

All that aside, however, Sacred Legends is a genuinely enjoyable take on a series that could've been catastrophically bad.

Switching genres to a battler has helped avoid any control scheme problems, and there's enough loot and quests here to tickle any RPG fan's fancy.

It's not the most original game out there, having borrowed most of its best ideas from other battlers, but it's a solid and well-presented take on the battler genre.

Sacred Legends review - Can the PC RPG make the transition to mobile?

It's not the most original battler/RPG on mobile, but Sacred Legends does a wonderful job bringing the series to a small screen
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.