Turning a popular card game into a playable video game, that’s free-to-play nonetheless, is something that can either hurt or aid the overall experience of the lore and player experience. When it comes to Magic the Gathering being used as the core foundation for Magic Legends, I would have to say that it is a definite improvement. While I am not a deep card collector, but rather one who likes to play a bit and owns a few decent decks, I did speak with a handful of other users that agree that Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios are putting Magic Legends on a good path.
Gameplay
Starting out, you pick the planeswalker that you want to use from the start. This will essentially be picking a mana color to main and how the overall look of your character will maintain throughout the game. Personally, I went with the Mind Mage because I have always been a fan of using blue in my decks, but all colors have their strengths and weaknesses. In the long-haul, this won’t matter too much because all characters can gather mana cards from all colors and eventually equipped spells with a wide range, including the option to not use the color your planeswalker started with at all.
Each planeswalker has its own base attack, which is performed by left-clicking the mousing while highlighting an enemy. Your movement is with the W,A,S,D keys (or the analog stick, if you use the controller), so don’t worry about this moving your character if you miss it. On top of your base attack, you have your specials and your spell attacks. The special attacks are locked into your planeswalker and can be used repeatedly without the cost of mana, but it does need to recharge after each use.
When it comes to spells, that’s where it gets a little trickier and the RNG (random number generation) comes in. Just as you don’t know what card you are going to draw from your deck when playing the card game, you don’t know which spell is going to be available after each use. You start out with two spell slots and when you use one spell, a timer holds it empty before it is randomly filled by a spell you have in your equipped deck. As you find more spells, you can start altering the deck to how you would prefer. Also, the more quests, skirmishes, and dungeons you conquer using the equipped spells, the more points you earn to level those spells up. Using spells is what uses your mana and the amount of mana used is variant to each spell, but it does regenerate over time through active combat.
Along with finding spells, you will find equipment for your character. None of this equipment actually shows, cosmetically, on your character as you will always look how you leave the tailor dressed as. Instead, these equipment pieces will give you benefits, such as specific mana proficiency or resistance, boost in health, increased mana recharge speed, and more. Equipment pieces give you an equipment level, so you can use that and the perks of each item to decide what items are best to wear and what to get rid of. Plus, once you find the items you plan to use for a while, they can also be upgraded to be even better.
When it comes to actual questing in this game, it can be confusing at first. After you do the initial tutorial, you will load up in the Tazeem Overworld. Here you will need to do one more mission before it gives you access to the multiplayer part of the game. After you do this mission, you will have a mark on the map and a guided pointer to tell you where the next quest start location is at. As you make your way over to it, be sure to interact with fast-travel waypoints so that you can move through the world faster. By interacting with the marked location, you will typically get a short battle and then before starting the actual quest it will have a menu. This menu is the same when starting events and dungeons as well.
On this menu, you are given a few options, the main two being the difficulty and if you want it to be a solo queue or party queue. If you choose party, it will load you into the quest with a couple of random players that are also looking to do that quest at that time. Their levels may not be the same as yours, but they will at least be able to manage the quest. When picking the difficulty, to even go to the second choice (hard) you have to have an equipment level of 400, which isn’t going to be something done quickly.
Expectations
I have heard rumors that they are working on it, but I still need to mention my biggest complaint with the game. The overall communication with other players is absolutely horrible! There is only one chat box and it is shared with the in-game chat, meaning that when you are doing a quest, everything that the NPC’s are saying goes in the chatbox and every little update to your character or the quest goes in there as well. On top of that, when you chat it only goes to the “Zone” you are in. I have also tried talking using “Whisper” and “Party” styles, but I have yet to successfully have a response from someone. This includes when I was in a discord chat with a friend and we tested it out while standing next to each other. The chat system needs some serious work.
Performance is another thing that needs a bit of work. I know I don’t have the best computer, but even with the settings on the lowest they can go, I get lag drops at times. I asked around to other users that had better computers than I do and they also get performance drops. Either more optimization needs to be implemented or better quality variety needs to be added to the settings so that players can get the game running on the quality that their hardware can handle smoothly. Note that I can excuse performance drops when a ton of spells and combat is going on at the same time, but it happens even when I am fighting enemies that use melee and I am the only one casting spells.
A shorter tutorial to get into the multiplayer would be a good idea. Once I reached the Tazeem Overworld, I pretty much knew how to play and the one quest that I did before it let me into the multiplayer didn’t really show me anything new aside from the Overworld itself. While that is a nice idea, it should not be mandatory to do before joining friends with a fresh character. Besides, if you are going to give an extended tutorial then you should make sure to cover things like how the fast travel system works, where the shopkeeps are at, and stuff like that. It took me a while to realize I had to open the map and select the fast travel waypoint I wanted to go to instead of walking up to the nearest waypoint and finding the menu that way. Granted, that is a more convenient system, but it wasn’t explained to me through the game.
Conclusion
Magic Legends is a very entertaining action RPG! This open beta shows that it is already on a great track. Sure, they have a few things to work on, but you can simply team up with people using an outside source, like Skype or Discord, in order to communicate and play with friends. For a free-to-play game, I have to highly recommend that you at least give it a couple of hours of playtime yourself, at the very least.
