Video Game Review: Raid: Shadow Legends

Why hello there, dear reader. Welcome back to my blog; so great of you to be sticking around with me. I have been absent for a while now and there is a reason for that. To put it simply: I’ve been going through a great deal of mental health related troubles related to my bipolar. It’s gotten so bad that I’m contemplating checking myself into a hospital for quick and immediate care. However, before I do that, I’m looking into a therapist. Whichever ends up being the course of action, I’ll let you know in a future update.

In-between all of this though, I have written a little bit of my megalist (which I now have no idea when it will be finished) and been checking out mobile games to kill the little waking time that I have (I’ve been sleeping a great deal). One of these is a notorious game that I’m sure a great many of you are familiar with: Raid: Shadow Legends. It was—and I guess still is—all over the Internet, especially YouTube. A great many influencers were paid quite well to promote it and say how it’s the most incredible mobile RPG on the market, though is it really?

To some: it isn’t a bad game. To others, it’s terrible. I decided I’d take a gander myself and see what all of the hubbub was. So come along, dear reader! Let’s take a dive into the world of Raid: Shadow Legends!

Raid is, at its heart, a very simplistic game; it’s one of those games where there is no central character. Instead, you have a large roster of heroes/champions/cannonfodder who you use to fight enemies with. In the case of Raid, the enemy is the Dark Lord Siroth, who’s brought strife to the land of Teleria. You must fix that by defeating him, or else the world descends into chaos and everyone is forced to use Luvdisc in every Pokémon game, even Gen I and Gen II.

The game starts out with four heroes going into a dragon’s lair to get some treasure. I can’t remember their names because Raid’s characterization is rather iffy. They fix the generic role[s] of what one would expect from a typical western RPG. There’s the bruteish person, the arrogant ranger, a stoic tank, and a fourth person who nobody cares about. It’s all very by-the-numbers and has been seen in a great many other RPGs.

Unlike those other RPGs though, the heroes actually lose. The ranger is eaten by the dragon and the other three are incinerated by the dragon. It’s at this point that the player picks their “character”. I use quotations there because that hero doesn’t really take the role of a general or anything; they’re just who you have as your first hero. I personally picked the ranger because I tend to play ranged classes in western RPGs; I prefer melee in J-RPGs.

After picking your hero, you begin your adventure. This puts you in a typical general hub, where you have various places you can visit for an array of purposes. They’re locked behind a level requirement though (which is standard fare for a mobile game). You also have a tutorial you must go through, which was painfully slow and given how simple Raid is, I honestly wanted to skip it since I knew how the game played.

Still, I marched forward, and learned the ropes. I learned how to summon heroes (more on this later because I have a lot to say) and the gameplay. You see: Raid’s gameplay is turn-based. If you’re unfamiliar with that style, just think of the aforementioned Pokémon, though not quite the same. Characters have an energy bar that, when full, allows them to act. This reminds me a bit of a flash game I used to play a lot when I was younger: “Monster’s Den: Book of Dread”. It’s, once again, not the same, but it’s what came to mind when I was playing it. I will say this, and this may give away how I felt about Raid as a whole, but I greatly preferred Monster’s Den.

Heroes have a few abilities they can use, which is actually something I liked about the game. It added more flavor to it. There’s a standard attack and some special ones. However, this appreciation for the game goes out the window for a few reasons. The first is that Raid is painfully sluggish. Luckily, you can speed up the game…

And allow the game to play itself.

Indeed, there’s an “Auto Play” system which makes it so the game will play itself, turning Raid into more of an idle game akin to Lilith Games’ “AFK Arena”. It actually really took me out of the game because any semblance of strategy was removed because I could let the game do all of the work for me while I sat around twiddling my thumbs. I admired the animations for about 30 seconds, but eventually found myself so bored that I stopped paying attention and went back to watching videos on YouTube, almost forgetting that the game existed.

Speaking of the animations, I should mention the game’s graphical quality. That’s a huge part of the marketing campaign for Raid. On my end, the game’s default graphics quality was set to “low”. Indeed, I don’t have a high-end phone; I use it to text friends on Messenger and Discord, listen to music, and browse the Internet. Mobile games were more tertiary until recently, so I’m not surprised that Raid doesn’t run amazingly.

Or at least, I wasn’t, until I realized the game was defaulted at 30 FPS.

For whatever inexplicable reason, the game has two settings for its framerate. 30 FPS and 60 FPS. Now, I get that if you’re Ubisoft, 30 FPS is more cinematic and whatnot, but I immediately switched to 60 FPS because the game prior to that ran like a fat kid at the Boston Marathon.

Beyond that tomfoolery, Raid looks… ehh, it looks fine. For a mobile game, it’s definitely above average. The ability animations are flashy and the character models are actually pretty decent (again, for a mobile game). However, the environments are generic at best and I found myself cringing at the PS2-era textures on things like gold piles. They stick out like a sore thumb and are meme material.

Anyways, beyond that, there isn’t much else to say about the graphics. The gameplay I’ve said my piece about and if I’m to be honest, I barely played the game because I grew bored. So any additional features, such as the game’s PvP, I didn’t even get to. This is because the game’s story failed to immerse me and the game bored me to tears. It also didn’t help that I was bombarded with pop-ups for microtransactions every time I returned to the general hub.

“STARTER PACK: ONLY $19.99!”

“BUY THIS PACK FOR $49.99!”

“SELL YOUR SOUL FOR 666 LEGENDARY HEROES!”

This isn’t really surprising though; the company which owns the developer makes slot machines, and Raid is a gacha game through and through. If you don’t know what a “gacha game” is, it’s basically a game which puts game progression on a random chance to get powerful characters/gear. It’s basically RNG progression, but you can bypass this by using your parents credit card to spend hundreds of dollars on ingame currency. It’s like playing a slot machine that masquerades as a video game.

A lot of gamers would label this as a “predatory practice” while at the same time falling for every grandiose trailer for an upcoming AAA title. In my eyes… yeah, it is, but that’s primarily on the fault of the consumer for feeding greedy developers. If people weren’t so foolish as to dump boatloads of cash on in-game items, predatory practices wouldn’t exist. I’m not sorry for saying that, but you're your own worst enemy when you buy a loot crate or some other slot machine inspired way to get a cosmetic item. Speak with your walle—oh wait, that hasn’t worked because sheep are sheep. Well, I guess we can all hope that Josh Hawley’s proposal to regulate/ban loot crates goes somewhere…

[Crickets Intensify]

Anyways, moving on, my patience with this game grew thin while it was playing itself. To summarize Raid is easy: it’s a mediocre—at best—mobile RPG with very little to offer beyond microtransactions and a large roster of champions that you can collect if you’re willing to either grind for ages or shell out copious amounts of cash. If you choose the latter, I hope you’re wealthy. If you opt for the former, I hope you’re patient.

Final Score: D

Hopefully, I can get back to writing on a somewhat regular basis. If not, just know this blog isn’t dead. It’s merely on hiatus until I get the medical help that I desperately need. So until next time: stay happy, stay safe, and God bless you all.