Mythical Strategies
Mythic Legends is a strategy game by Hyper Dot Studios, where you collect heroes to battle in gladiatorial battles. You can battle through the main lobby, daily events, and a tournament mode using legends and champions to defeat what are supposed to be other players. Unfortunately, most of these ‘players’ are actually bots and the queue is incredibly unbalanced.
Before diving into the critical issues of this title, let’s explore the positives. The art style is bright and cartoony, and all the animations are smooth to boot. The controls are also fairly simple and there are new challenges daily to provide players with fresh content.
The cards and battle system are well designed. There is a good variety of character cards, but not so many that it becomes confusing. There are also options to boost your character’s stats by pairing characters of the same type or origin together. These aspects create an actual element of strategy that the game is intended to have.
Too Easy To Pay-To-Win
The game starts off incredibly easy, as it is an auto-chess game. You set up your characters or game pieces and press ‘play’, and the game plays itself until the round or battle is over. Unfortunately this means there is little gameplay in this genre, leaving the pull of this genre to the strategy elements.
This game, however, is the exception to that concept. Even when purposefully putting in my lowest level characters, I would win the match. This was true even when the opposing player had the same or even stronger character cards. At least, this is how the game went for the first few days I played it. After my fourth day of playing, I lost my first battle. I played for a few hours per day initially, and no longer had to look at my phone to play. I started having battles going while I was working, or cleaning, and would just tap battle over and over to test how long my winning streak lasted. Shockingly, I had not lost in my first three days. Then, I lost another battle. And another.
I quickly realized that I was being paired with players who had double or triple the power of my team. Then, I would be put in a battle where I would dominate my opponent. For the rest of my playtime that day, I would be pummeled. Not only is this an incredibly balanced queue, but this is a common tactic with apps with a pay-to-win structure. The rest of my time playing this game followed this pattern.
Bot Players Flooding The Arena
Many players with very similar names are what you will encounter in this title. Throughout the game, you will fight players with very similar names. The very few times I encountered a real player were the only times the battles were evenly matched. There is also a button that allows you to fast-forward the battle on most battles, but only battles in which your opponent is a bot show this.
Bot players are not inherently wrong. There is, however, something wrong with all of the bot players being unmatched in my current skill range. The game wants you to feel like you excel at the game, and immediately throw you under the rug to be pummeled by manufactured bots three times your strength. This makes players desire in-app purchases to level themselves up enough to take on these other players. The game makes you feel inadequate and makes it feel necessary to level up if you want to make any progress in the game.
