Raid Shadow Legends is a RPG that focuses on team building and turn-based combat. A key feature of the game is the variety of champions you can randomly draw from a gacha system. These champions can be used to engage in turn-based combat with enemies in a variety of content areas. These include the campaign, dungeons, arena, and more. Each champion has a variety of attacks, buffs, debuffs, and other ways to affect combat, making each hero feel unique.
The Aesthetic
The game is also well-known for its amazing graphics for the genre, making it one of the more well-known games in the mobile RPG industry. It takes place in a beautiful but dark fantasy themed world and the design of the game reflects that perfectly. The buildings and hubs in the game also reflect the medieval fantasy type style the game is going for, while having a modern spin on some of the designs.
The Gacha System
The game is also very well known for its gacha system (as mentioned above), which is a major part of the game and your progression. The game has 5 notable tiers of champions including Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. While Legendary typically are the strongest in most cases, you can usually find use for the lower tier champions in most places. Also most free to play players will usually not come across many legendary tier champions in their playtime, so it’s best to maximize your resources when you can.
There are 4 different shards the player can summon from:
Mystery shards, which give common, uncommon, and rare champions. But these will be the ones you earn completely free, and you’ll earn quite a bit of these.
Ancient Shards, which can give the player rare, epic, and legendary champions. Most of the type, you’ll only be able to acquire these through purchase, but they do sometimes give them for free.
Void Shards, which are similar to Ancient shards, the only difference is that they can only give void type champions. Other shards do not give you the option for void type champions.
Sacred Shards, which can only give the player epic and legendary champions. These usually can be expensive but give you the most direct boost. From what I can tell they’re also rarely given free to players outside rare events.
The Combat
The combat in the game is relatively simple and easy to understand, even for new players. The main purpose of the game is to select heroes which synergize and work well in specific situations. All heroes and enemies rely on two main systems, the turn meter and champion affinity.
The turn meter is underneath every champion, including enemies and it indicates when the character will be able to take their turn. There are multiple ways to affect the turn meter directly or indirectly through a stat called speed or by buffing/debuffing the meter directly.
Each champion is also assigned an affinity which can be one of four types, Force, Spirit, Magic, and Void
Force counters Magic and loses to Spirit
Spirit counters Force and loses to Magic
Magic counters Spirit and loses to Force.
The unique one is void which has no weaknesses at the cost of zero strengths. Meaning that it’s completely neutral to all other affinities.
The Community
You can also interact with other player’s using the chat function, but the game also has a clan feature (like guilds in other games), which allows you to build a community of player’s which can suit your playstyle, whether it be more dedicated and hardcore or simply casual. The community outside of the game on social media such as reddit and discord is also quite active and willing to help newer players.
My experience playing the game
To start off, I genuinely enjoyed this experience, especially compared to other mobile games in this genre. It was easy to understand and felt fair in general which I really appreciated. While I didn’t quite like the in-app purchase deals as much as some other games, some were quite nice for the price. But forgoing all that information, I’ll go into further detail about how I experienced playing Raid Shadow Legends.
Download and starting a new game
The download process for the game was simple and easy which was nice to see. After the download completed it took you into a nice cutscene that setup the basis of the world, along with a tutorial that introduced you to four characters, one of which you can pick at the end. I ended up choosing Dark Wizard named Kael as I found his aesthetic the most pleasing and he remains one of my stronger characters to this date.
General Gameplay
As I got into the actual game it led me to all the different areas in the game (which was forced onto the player) and into my first combat. After a few combats it then taught me more about the upgrade system, which was nice, but since I am used to this type of game I kind of wise I could’ve skipped this part, but that’s a minor fault.
After that, I was on my own to level and played as I pleased. A lot of the time you’ll be spending in the game is in the campaign mode, as it’s what you unlocked the earliest and generates the most progression in the game outside of straight up summoning new characters. I was able to progress a decent way through the campaign but did reach a few stopping points where I needed to upgrade my gear or fast level my characters.
I also spent time making sure all my early adventures got to 3 stars, as that can be done by running each campaign mission with only two characters, which at time added a decent difficulty to the game. I personally like to play the game with auto mode and 2x speed on, as it saves me time. But when the difficulty was much harder, I had to take off auto mode and use my skills more tactfully, which I thought was fun.
Leveling early on was fairly quick, even without spending money early on as the game gives you a fair number of resources early on. While I did get stuck sometimes, especially the later I progressed, a little money and some help from guides in the community easily allowed me to pave my way further into the game.
The dungeons in the game were the first content that I truly felt I needed both resources and more strength due to the fact that it requires 5 characters to do dungeons, and it is definitely scaled to that fact. They also progressed in strength quite rapidly, so I was allowed to simply auto mode them and not care, as I actually hate to bring some small strategies to make sure that my limited number of characters could clear the content.
I eventually spent some money on the packs that I personally felt were worth the cost and those helped me keep pace quite a bit in my gameplay. I didn’t regret purchasing them, which is rare for mobile games as it can sometimes feel like you don’t quite get your worth.
Strategies I personally use and recommend
There are certain things you can do in the game that can make your adventure much smoother, especially if you want to aim for the higher rewards in Kashkick. I’ll go over what I did and what I personally recommend doing if you want to make the most of your experience.
Promo codes
The game introduces a lot of promo codes, most of which can be easily found across the internet quite easily. While promo codes are limited to once per day, it’s important to use certain ones whenever you can, especially the new player promo codes. These promo codes will be key to helping you progress quickly, as they can be a good boost early on.
In-app purchases
Raid shadow legends offers a lot of good deals and options in terms of in-app purchases, but it’s important to know which offers are good and when you should purchase them. I personally spent roughly 25$ through my playthrough and it helped me quite a bit during my progression. With that in mind there’s one main thing to keep in mind when your thinking about spending money.
Is the deal good for where I am currently in the game?: This is a very important question to ask yourself due to the fact some deals can rush you through the game, but tend to be better when your account has some more power in general. For example, deals that give summoning gems are always great at any point in the game, but deals that give materials could potentially be better used later in the game after you’ve either farmed or been given higher tier gear that you can then upgrade directly.
Also, some deals are best used when the player is stuck progression wise, rather than buying whenever. Keeping constant progression is important if you want to reach your goals, so it’s best to keep track of when you get stuck on a campaign or dungeon boss that you can’t quite clear. That boost could potentially really help you bypass whatever you’re stuck up, which makes it key to be patient when making a purchase.
Keeping track of events
While this may seem obvious at first, the game always has tons of active events, so it’s important to keep track of them all and make sure to claim them when possible. The game also always has tons of running events which you can forget to keep track of. Some even have clear requirements that aren’t obvious if you don’t check them immediately.
I kept a small document of some of the event details written on my computer to make sure that I didn’t miss any important events. While some events will normally give you a notification for competition others won’t. This means it will be important for you to keep track of when certain events complete and turn those in. This is especially true for events with shorter time spans, such as a weeklong event which just started around the time I started playing.
Summary
Raid Shadow Legends is a very good game if you plan to play it for Kashkick. There’s enough content to keep you entertained, while also having in-app payment options to speed up your adventure. Ultimately, if you enjoy this genre of game, then you’ll enjoy this experience, but if you might be newer, I think it will give you a solid introduction into this genre. I think I’d give it a solid 8.5/10 if I had to rate my overall experience.