Customize your heroic raid party
Raid: Shadow Legends is a free-to-play role-playing video game wherein you must save a dark fantasy world from the clutches of evil. Developed by Plarium Global Ltd., this strategy gacha game features turn-based combat and gorgeous 3D graphics for its numerous playable characters. This PC version is played on the Plarium Play launcher, which allows you to enjoy its HD textures, easy controls, and cross-platform capabilities.
Is Raid: Shadow Legends popular?
Raid: Shadow Legends features a tragically-beautiful dark fantasy realm that might remind fans of the Lord of the Rings and the Warcraft series. Unlike most RPG gacha games, the character designs here look grittier in detail and you can collect different races in your quest to liberate Teleria. Your main opponent is the Dark Lord Siroth and as the chosen one of the Arbiter, you must destroy his forces by clearing dungeons and defeating the various enemy bosses who stand in your way.
The main campaign features over 12 different locations to venture into and has a fully-voiced story. There are also over 300 collectible Champions to choose from—all hailing from 16 different factions. From sorcerers to knights, they all have varying playstyles so you can create the ultimate raid party. Each of them can be upgraded with skills and equipment to continue challenging powerful enemies. You’ll need to successfully recruit these Champions first, however.
There are three ways to get your Champions, found in the Portal of your Bastion map. Shard Summon uses 4 types of Shards: the Mystery Shard, Ancient Shard, Void Shard, and Sacred Shard. These vary in drop rates in stages and what rarity of Champions they can produce—Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, or Legendary. Fusion, on the other hand, allows you fuse specific characters to get special Champions. Meanwhile, Fragment Summon requires you to collect a specific number of Champion Fragments to summon special characters.
Who is the best character in Raid: Shadow Legends?
Your Champions can be boosted by Artifacts—upgradable equipment and their sets—Skills, and Masteries. The equipment type usually doesn’t matter in this game so you’ll find melee weapons that will grant all-around bonus stats. In combat, your party will usually consist of 4 but the number will sometimes fluctuate. Champions with an Aura Skill are great as Leaders. Each character, however, has an Affinity—Magic, Spirit, Force, and Void. Magic beats Spirit, Spirit beats Force, and Force beats Magic, while Void has no direct weakness.
You should take those into consideration when choosing your party members, as each stage will usually display the Affinity of the last boss you’ll face on it. The battles are straightforward, as your party automatically moves through the area and faces off against three enemy groups in each level. If you're in a hurry, you can utilize the Auto-battle and X2 buttons. All in all, there are 5 game modes available: Campaign, Dungeons, Faction Wars, Arena, and Clan Boss. The last one is only available for those belonging to a Clan.
The flow of the game is simple: get Champions, clear stages, strengthen them, and repeat. However, as time passes by, you’ll notice that the higher your own level climbs, the game's difficulty spikes up, too. For one, resources and upgrading are quite costly in this game. Silver is the in-game currency but you can easily burn through your hoard if you try to upgrade all equipment pieces of your Champions. Shard Summon requires paying Silver even when you already have a Shard. This game can be pretty upfront about its microtransactions.
Not just a simple RPG
Overall, Raid: Shadow Legends isn’t just some casual online RPG. You need to be able to commit and wisely manage your resources and Champions in order to take down the toughest of enemies—both AI and real players. While the constant pop-ups can be annoying, the cash shop ones do offer some really nice loot that would be handy for your adventures. It’s only too bad that for the vast selection of heroes, there aren’t any interesting flavor text on them regarding the game’s lore.
