I have always thought the Pokémon games would be a great fit on iOS. Sure, it’s already on 3DS, but mine rarely leaves the house — and I’ve always got my phone on me. Of course, that’s never happening as long as Nintendo has its own hardware competing in the mobile gaming scene. For now, I’d be happy settling for a good Pokémon clone. There’s clearly a demand for it, as there are actually tons of such clones already on the App Store. The thing is, I’ve tried a lot of them and nearly every last one is pretty bad (and the ones that aren’t bad still aren’t great). Someday though, somebody’s bound to crack the formula and drop an incredible monster collector on the App Store. By formula, I mean the core of what really makes Pokémon fun, not a direct copy of the actual mathematical formulas that make Pokémon tick.
Well, I’m sure those of you who aren’t Pokémon fans are becoming glassy-eyed, so I’ll move on. The point is, I’ve just played Outplay Entertainment’s newest iOS title, Monster Legacy. It’s — you guessed it! — another Pokémon clone. A quick glance at the screenshots and I’m sold (of course, the asking price was FREE, so persuading me to give it a try really didn’t take much — I was sold at “Exciting Monster Battles!”). Monster Legacy is currently soft-launched in the New Zealand and Philippines App Stores, but like most soft launches, that means it should be hitting worldwide soon.
You are tasked with exploring the world of Arborea as a Keeper. Keepers are special people who are infused with elemental energy. That’s not really explained, but suffice it to say that this makes them uniquely qualified to train Monsters (the clever name used for Arborean monsters). Magic wand in hand and a bag of gold in pocket, you set off on a grand adventure to meet up with a nearby professor-dude. About halfway there, your guide realizes you don’t have any Monsters yet and points out you can just buy one from the Shop. Just a quick tap of the Shop button and 8,000 coins later, you find yourself nicknaming a brand new fire monkey (aka Primon). The professor fellow is just down the road and he kindly teaches you how to battle by letting your Primon stomp all over his elementally-disadvantaged Whooter.
Battle is simple enough, though you’ll immediately notice that loading the battle is anything but quick and smooth. An extremely close-up monster face kind of shakes around the screen with a few random lightning bolts. The words “KEEPER BATTLE!” are emblazoned across the screen. The animation is jittery and it takes a surprisingly long time. You hope that’s not the case for every battle. It is.
Once you finally get into battle, he’ll teach you all about Hit Points and Magic Points. Each monster has four attack types: Physical, Magical, Stats, and Super. Physical attacks can be used freely. Magical attacks cost a good chunk of your magic bar but are usually more powerful than Physical attacks. Stats attacks boost your stats or lower your opponent’s, they cost a small bit of your magic bar. Finally, Super attacks are by far the most powerful but you must spend gems, the premium currency, to fire them off.
The elemental matchup system is simple. There are just four elements and they form a circular relationship with each other. Earth is good against Water, which is good against Fire, which is good against Air, which is in turn good against Earth. Each monster is representative of only one elemental type.
It’s a little simplistic and loading a battle takes longer than it should, but at this point Monsters Legacy could still be okay. There’s some good stuff going for it, the graphics are pretty good and the monsters are well-designed. The shop spoils the mystery and you can see many of the monsters and there evolutions from the get-go. The little ones look cute and the evolutions become increasingly cool and fierce. it’s expected, but the designers have done a pretty good job creating interesting creature lines with acceptably clever names.
Monsters Legacy isn’t okay though. Far from it, it’s kind of the perfect example of everything that’s wrong with free-to-play. Timers, paywalls, and ads abound. Monsters only have enough MP to use two or three Magical attacks before they run out. Magical Attacks are so much better than Physical Attacks that it’s unlikely they’ll survive any more battles once they’re out of MP. There are several ways to heal your monsters, but they’re all unreliable, expensive, or time-consuming. The best way to heal your monsters is to level them up, but that’s hard when running out of MP basically means they aren’t going to be winning any more battles. You can wait out the healing, but even a level 1 monster takes about 3 hours to fully heal. You can rotate out your battle-weary monsters for monsters that have healed, but you only get to keep 15 monsters at a time unless you pay for more storage. Finally, monsters can be instantly healed with gems or certain items. Gems are the premium currency and can only be acquired through in-app purchase. Healing items can be bought with coins, but they’re so expensive that you’ll need to spend more than you’ll find just from playing the game. That takes you right back to spending more real money, this time on bundles of coins.
There’s plenty more you can do with gems. You can spend gems to boost the power of any one of your monsters’ attacks. You can do this over and over again, effectively making your monster’s attacks extremely overpowered. You can also spend gems to instantly evolve a monster, whereas it normally must reach a certain level first. I guess these are okay if people really want to do them. Despite the game requiring a constant network connection, I can’t find any sign of social interaction besides gifting monsters to friends. If this game had any kind of multiplayer, I’d find the use of gems to overpower your monsters to be an awful practice, as it turns the game into a question of who can pay the most. The IAP here is abusive and frequently puts up timers and paywalls to encourage players to spend more. The one positive thing I can say about the IAP system is that any in-app purchase will disable the ads. The ads are not present all the time, but pop-ups that take up most of the screen will show up frequently and must be manually dismissed.
In so many ways, the game is a strange mix of good content that really missed the mark. I could go on in detail, but I think the point of the review is clear: you shouldn’t spend any of your time on this game. I’ll briefly cover a few more issues in case you are still on the fence:
• The music sounds fully orchestrated. It’s interesting and vivacious, but the loops are all really short so it gets very repetitive.
• Despite a simple movement system (tap to move), the movement is finicky and you will find that some taps don’t register at all while others make you start moving in a completely different direction than you intended.
• The combat is bad. It seems like they just scraped the surface of the Pokémon combat system without thinking about why it works. You can see information about your move’s power, but the numbers are confusing and your monster’s stats are only viewable outside of battle. It seems really strange to me that you can’t see a monsters stats in combat, which seems like the most important place to know your stats. Finally, the typing system makes everything far too simple. All monsters represent only one element offensively and defensively. There’s no fear of an Air monster possibly knowing a Water attack. Your Fire monster can switch in completely confident that all of his attacks are going to be super effective and all incoming attacks are going to be weak against him.
• The individuality of your monsters is almost non-existent. In Pokémon, the wild encounters are randomized so multiple members of the same species will have varying genders, abilities, colors, and stats. This adds variety and also makes your Pokémon feel special to you as very few players will have one with the exact same stats. You can also choose what moves your Pokémon learn as they level up. Not so in Monsters Legacy: every single level 1 Shrewberry has the exact same stats and moves. At least you can nickname them.
Alright, so I’m a little bit of a Pokémon snob, but I have the experience to know how fun these types of games can be. Monsters Legacy fails in so many ways and almost all of it can be attributed to a horrible monetization system. It’s so easy to harp on bad IAP these days, but it’s frankly just not fun to only get 3 battles out of a monster, wait 3 hours for it to heal, and then repeat that process over and over. I’m still confident that someday we’ll see some great monster collecting and battling games on iOS, but Monsters Legacy is not one of them.
