Dark Legends (iOS) - Preview
by Gordon Bryant , posted on 28 March 2012 / 4,115 Views
Vampires are so in right now, and Spacetime Studios is taking a whack at the genre with their newest free-to-play MMO: Dark Legends. This marks a departure for Spacetime, since Dark Legends is an adult game with sexy vampires and gratuitous bloodletting, whereas their previous efforts were very much for kids or otherwise family friendly. As they explained it to me, it's more True Blood than Twilight, focusing on the sexy and aggressive nature of vampires to create a sleek, stylish online game that can be played cross system on tablets and other mobile devices.
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In Dark Legends, you play as your own created vampiress and take it through the campaign that consists of 10 worlds, each made up of about a dozen or so smaller levels and events. You have your own crypt to return to when you want to purchase new clothes or skins, but most of the game takes place in these quest lines. Each of the 10 available worlds has a series of levels you have to complete; most are just simple events like “press this button to enter building” or “investigate this old alleyway” with a time delay meter and usage of energy like in most browser based or facebook apps. Once you've made it through a few of these events, you're then put into a completely different gameplay mode that has you walking around in a 3D realm like more traditional MMO's.
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This is where the game gets interesting, as the combat is pretty good for an MMO like this, allowing for more strategy by mixing up attacks and giving you the option to charge up or just attack furiously. In the build I was shown, I only got to see them kill zombies but I'm under the impression other creatures will become available to slay as time goes on. In this game, rather than having health and mana as seperate gauges, you only have the blood gauge which functions as both. Using special attacks or getting hit causes your blood gauge to go down, but sucking the blood of enemies refills it. This is an interesting mechanic because if you're smart and manage yourself well, you can even kill bosses by draining their blood.
Dark Legends offers a reasonably robust skill tree system that gives you better skills and abilities as you progress, and there's even a really detailed and well-designed achievement list that is sorted into clear categories for the achievement seekers.
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The main selling point of Dark Legends is that since it was developed by Spacetime Studios it's going to be cross-compatible across all sorts of mobile systems. The software they've developed allows them to not only have it playable on iOS, android, and the chrome browser, but also have them play nicely together.
Dark Legends will be releasing first on the Kindle for an exclusive two week period before being released on all other systems. Spacetime Studios hopes to have the game on the market in a month or two. If you want to get a sneak peek at the kind of visual appeal the game is going for, head over to http://www.darklegends.com/main.php and check out the first trailer.
