A Critical Analysis of Shadow of Legend
This is the beauty of Shadow of Legend. You tell your friends, "Yeh! I can make it! Just pick me up!", and while you wait in the car and in the line for the movie, you take out your trusty pocket pc, and join in on the raid. Now, everybody can be happy.
Yet, let's think about this realistically. While Shadow of Legend is capable of cross-platform technology and is paving the way for a new breed of MMORPG gaming, we still have to ask ourselves how Shadow of Legend, itself, rates as game.
For most players, what makes a good game is a combination of different elements. These elements will seek to fulfill the needs of individual players, such as (1) achievement and accomplishment, (2) stress-relief, (3) building and maintaining friendships, (4) putting your leadership and teamwork skills to good use, and (5) problem-solving. The game's ability to fulfill these needs listed above will determine the score of the most important and overbearing element for MMOs: Immersion.
You begin the game with a choice of different races and classes, which make you feel as if you'll be playing something along the lines of Baulders Gate, Diablo II, or Icewind Dale. In many ways, Shadow of Legend does share many similarities with these aforementioned games, such as the atmosphere, setting, and the game being very quest-driven. However, Shadow of Legend is different in that it is an MMORPG, which makes the quests only a secondary appeal to the actual players in the game. Thus, in the way that SOL is set up, fulfilling the need for achievement and accomplishment are possible by completing the quests, but if you're seeking achievement and accomplishment for your guild, there are very little quests or events set up at the moment that facilitates that kind of involvement.
As a stress-reliever, Shadow of Legend provides you with a lot of neat little features you can explore, such as the acquisition of mounts, crafting tools, magic skill books, different professional paths, criminal statuses, and more. Yet, while these strengthen the "fun" factor of the game, it is also the game's biggest weakness. In order to advance your equipment and skills in the game, you need certain items, books, and raw materials. The higher the level you get, it becomes increasingly harder to find and collect desired items, which results in two things: (1) others who have the much needed items will sell them at extremely high and unfair prices, and (2) you will be searching and gathering the items for long periods of time, making the game very tedious to play at these times.
The Shadow of Legend community is something that you and friends will love. The community is made up of people from all around the world. I'm talking about players from Europe, Russia, China, North America, South America, Africa, and more. Everybody is extremely friendly and nice. We help each other out, we joke around, and we all have a good time. Building friends and maintaining friendships isn't a problem for Shadow of Legend. What the game could do better for facilitating friendship is by implementing a "Friends" channel to the chat system, but I don't think that'll be too difficult to program into the game. The only other way SOL can improve the quality of the community is by increasing the quantity of its players. Hopefully, the current community, itself, will aid in the attraction such players.
Leadership and teamwork skills continue to remain somewhat non-existent in SOL, because as I mentioned before, there are a lack of quests and events that promote group work in large numbers. However, there is A LOT of players helping out other players on an individual basis. These are players who don't even know the other player, and yet, they still help these perfect strangers complete their quests. There is an entire support system in SOL, which is comprised of community itself. This is the real attraction of SOL. That and the fact that you can take the community along with you at all times in your pocket.
Lastly, puzzles also seem to be non-existent in SOL. You will not find traps, mazes, or movable landscapes in the game. The point of the current quests and events in the game are all directed to one thing, and one thing only: Gaining experience. You fight and level up, so you can move on the next quest, and yet, that quest you finally reached asks you to fight even more! This is a little ridiculous. You begin to question, "What is the point or end result of completing all the quests?" This cycle of gaining experience so you can gain more experience makes you feel as though Shadow of Legend as a game lacks a purpose. Puzzles can add to the variety of the game's fun, and will intellectually stimulate the player's minds, but it will not make the game more meaningful, which is what SOL so desperately needs at the moment.
On a scale of 1 – 10, I'd give Shadow of Legend a 6/10. Although, I was very critical about the game in my review, the players and I who are actually playing the game, enjoy it very much. The is no game that is out right now that is anything like SOL, and I'm not just talking about the game's ability to be played on a mobile device. I'm talking about the environment, the game play, and the community of SOL makes this game a unique and enjoyable experience. I agree, that Shadow of Legend is a work in progress, and that hopefully by implementing new functions that coincide with its players' interests, Shadow of Legend can possibly go down in history as one fantastic game that was way ahead of its time.