Legion War is the perfect summer wargame

There is one obstacle when playing the strategy game. All games have a pre-learning stage (even using a mouse or controller is a skill we all have to learn), but strategy in particular often gets me to start the game, staring Stare at its menu or map or world screen to find while, then close it down. It’s a kind of focal premium.

In this sweltering heat (hello other countries, congrats you’re not here, for various reasons) these fees have almost bankrupted me, and only partly because I’m still weaning myself Dear. Employees & Resources. I retreated to something more appealing. A little place that didn’t charge me upfront, but made me comfortable to sit in and spray a cooling mist in my face.

Legion War is all my brain can process right now, is what I’m getting.

I insured Legion war for Unknown pleasures a few years ago, and now that it’s had a full release, I’m happy to see even that recommendation if anything detracts from it.

But what exactly is it? Good. It’s a war game. No, really. Don’t let the cute art, clunky user interface, or the fact that one faction’s frontline soldiers are field mice fool you. Legion War has some solid cuts of meat even if those cuts are lean and carved into a smiley face. It’s about building from a tiny castle into an unstoppable conquering force, by balancing the numbers of a very abstract economy and carefully selecting the right military units. .

There is no city formation, just occupying existing castles and support locations. Each castle pumps out gold, research, and industry, and also gains its own XP over time, periodically unlocking a location for a new building or upgrading an existing one. Buildings can increase the production of those resources or give more energy or serve to increase the odds you’ll find a special item or allow you to recruit mercenaries if you’ve also captured one. mercenary base somewhere. Or they can act as military bases, increasing your unit cap based on the number of nearby villages, or detecting hostile units, or absorbing more damage and healing units. more effective philanthropist. Thus, even a basic facility upgrade leads to a multitude of micro-decisions that over time can create dramatically different possibilities.

“Even a basic facility upgrade leads to a multitude of micro-decisions that can create dramatically different possibilities.”

Gold is used mainly to upgrade buildings, but can also be used to recruit troops and buy magical items from the market. The items themselves still offer more of a difference, allowing your heroes to stand out a bit more. But even if some of your hero units are equipped, the leftover crap is still worth collecting because you can add it to the template for one of your normal units, changing the ability their capabilities in exchange for higher production costs.

Even without those items, you’ll mass upgrade your units on a per-type basis using industry points. Instead of choosing bonuses for individual units as they level up (they get XP, but the levels simply increase their numbers automatically, making experienced units desirable without asking for more). micromanagement requirements), those sector points unlock your choice of expertise for the entire troop type. Most of these picks are exclusive, so once you’ve committed to making your archers do better damage with dealers, you’ve got no chance to make them more durable, but picks the latter can allow you to mitigate that or double their expertise, or add a side effect to their special attack. And that is if you touch the archer. Instead, you can invest your industrial hammer to upgrade your expensive support or mage class, or upgrade some of your unit types for a military strategy. broader.

Each unit type is already faction-specific, though, making each of these decisions highly variable even before considering your opponent’s faction or how they align their own guys. The faces lean towards archetypes but have room to breathe, be it by upgrading troops in a certain way or favoring different types. The undead, as you might expect, tend towards weaker but much cheaper units (some of their picks push this even further, making the skeletons more fragile but extremely expensive. bargain) and assist magicians who can turn over the gravestones of any dead soldier. into more minions and special attacks that weaken and prepare the enemy for further attacks.

As they utilize overwhelming power and build, the animal faction is more tactical, with troops that perform better when redirected around the front lines and spells based on temporary object placement on the map. The wooden and brass robots are expensive but hard and self-healing, and more in terms of positioning and map control, with bomb-and-shoot around spells to mark enemies in place. and unit attacks send them around and into each other for extra damage. I mentioned magic a few times there, because it’s still another class: each faction is constantly generating energy, to power up its own unique set of spells, which can be upgraded by research points … or you can direct that research into military or economic upgrades instead.

There are still more classes, as hero units are also faction-specific and have their own, more traditional (albeit partially random) leveling system, as well as access to mercenary heroes between clans. factions and depending on the map you can capture temples or undersea cities, each city has a different set of units to layer into all of these.

When I put it all out at once, it sounded overwhelming. But the great strength of Legion War is its accessibility. It’s one of the few strategy games that even a fairly inexperienced player can get into and learn from as they play with a reasonable level of confidence. From the first turns when there are almost no decisions to be made, to the mids where you are frantically moving your one-note army from one crisis to another, to the later stages where you Confidently deploying troops and spells against a specific target, it’s a game of complexity that reveals itself in levels.

Especially with guidance enabled, it’s always clear when to do what and when to turn to the next turn. While there are countless possibilities in total, you never need to worry about more than a few of them at once. And it’s always time to expand and fight and recruit. If you can afford something, you probably won’t make the mistake of paying for it now.

Both are a lot taller than they seem, and everything is…well, normal. It’s an unfortunate term that gets loaded in many game circles, but Legion War has certainly taken some cues from a specific ‘casual’ type of game that is anything but. If I had to reduce it, I’d say playing at a high level can help understand how to make numbers multiply and learn the patterns of building a kind of permanently moving army/economy. But that’s not most RPGs, really? And a large number of strategy games? It’s all that sometimes cold, emotionless math… but then makes the details important enough to be interesting and give you just the right amount of control. All with personality, too. Cute style isn’t quite endearing, but, well. These are some cute troops, I won’t lie. There is a faction that keeps cats and rabbits with rifles. You can open a box and have a cowboy jump out. I had the ancient god of death, the god of death, the scourge of mankind and the conqueror of many cities, culminated by a smiling penguin. It disarms weapons, but makes them no less formidable as enemies.

Those enemies will also fight each other, fortunately. Letting them control each other is the key and the closest thing to diplomacy. Legion War is all wars all the time. More is always better, and stabilization periods are few and short. But you should be careful not to put yourself among many opponents. Perhaps my most successful campaign was as the undead, against three random AIs, all human, all fighting at sea for a central island. As I marched another army south across the ice, I encountered the remnants of the two sides who had pointed each other’s throats while I crushed my first neighbor, and realized that I essentially playing a white pedestrian against three idiots who killed each other for me. It’s a nice change from everyone picking you out no matter what. Always a great moment when the rogue jumps out from the shadows to stab your death knight running into a common enemy and gets cut in half.

Less nice is the habit of explaining some of its things. While the translation is generally good and the broad strokes easy to learn, the details are often buried in various encyclopedia screens with little cross-linking. A few turn summary screens won’t be a problem, especially when it comes to recognizing which spells are cast and which units have died (the camera zooms in wrongly when the unit fights or dies being a problem). Weird theme popular with games in the last few years. Just me?). Oh, and some random events are crap.

Legion War occupies an odd position. It’s something that I can recommend to a wide audience, while also meeting a niche need. Sometimes you want to have a big fight without being mindless, but also without demanding much or getting tired of playing. A rabbit with a rifle. A cooling mist. I think it’s going to be more difficult than it should be thanks to surface-level impressions, and when my head thinks things are sublime from my hearing, I can confidently say big words to make people feel better. Read better game play.