Loot & Legends Review

Developer: DropForge Games
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

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Loot & Legends is a free-to-play, turn-based strategy game that tries its darndest to capture the look and feel of playing a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons while simultaneously creating its own, card-based loot system. Although it sounds a bit peculiar, Loot & Legends is largely successful in what it sets out to do, making it a pretty awesome package for strategically-minded, dungeon-crawling enthusiasts.

For anyone familiar with age-old fantasy tropes, almost everything in Loot & Legends' structure and lore should be unsurprising. Players make a party consisting of a warrior, priest, and wizard, all of whom go on adventures battling goblins, kobolds, lizardmen, etc both for the greater good of the world and for loot to make them ever stronger against more difficult foes.

The neat thing about all of this is that everything is presented as if the players are not in the game world, but rather in a friend's basement playing a tabletop game. This means that all of the in-game characters are cardboard standees on a board, and each piece of loot acts as a set of actions (represented by cards in a deck) rather than anything material for the heroes to wear.

Loot & Legends goes so far in this direction that much of the narrative is explained through dungeon master monologues, which occasionally break the fourth wall to tease players or flirt with the pizza delivery girl that comes by the house. While I could have done without some of the dungeon masters' banter, the rest of this presentation createsa really unique and fun feel.

When it comes to the gameplay, thecard-based system makes what might otherwise seem like an ordinary turn-based strategy game feel extraordinary. Early on, players only have access to a limited set of gear to equip for cards, but as they progress new types of gear emerge with cards that can build off of gear of the same type, making the deck-building feel akin to something like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering -although not quite as deep.

As part of its free-to-play structure,Loot & Legends has multiple currencies that can be used to unlock new gear via chests or by joining the Loot Club, which allows for additional drops while completing missions. Players can elect to buy these currencies using cash or earn limited versions of the perks by entering the Challenge Area, which offers a set of increasingly difficult missions to complete. While the Challenge Arena is a novel way for players to earn premium items access to it is time gated, which might be frustrating for some.

Loot & Legends is a great package as far as free-to-play strategy games go, particularly for those fond of D&D. Although sometimes it gets awkward with the dungeon master dialogue, the strategy elements are unique and compelling, and its free-to-play hooks are relatively benign. If you ask me, it's hard to ask for a better trade-off than that.