Review: DC Legends brings the Blackest Night to mobile gaming

The DC Comics universe has never really had its fair share of mobile games in comparison to their rival publisher. Sure, there have been solid releases alongside games like the original Injustice: Gods Among Us, but those typically felt like companion apps more than an individual experience. Now WB Games San Francisco is looking to bring some of the magic Marvel had with the Avengers Alliance games in the studio’s new mobile RPG game for Android and iOS, DC Legends.

This turned-based battle game, played on your phone or tablet, lets players assemble a Justice League of their own from a roster of beloved DC Comics characters like Superman, Batman, Flash, and the iconic Wonder Woman to name a few . Should you lean more towards the dark side, players can recruit a Legion of Doom from other villains available like Sinestro, The Joker, Lex Luthor, and Deathstroke. Pit your four-person teams in the games story mode or online against other DC fans in the game’s player v player arena. Like any other RPG, every character you unlock can be upgraded to acquire new power moves and fight higher level battles. The game’s ultimate prize for your character is turning them Legendary status. When you upgrade your character to a six-star rank they’ll appear in their ultimate form, Green Lantern, for instance, gets a new will powered armor look or The Joker gets a dapper new hat like in The Killing Joke.

Acquiring and upgrading  characters in the game never feels AS MUCH of a boring grind as it does in most other mobile games like these. This is in part due to the superb animations the game shows you for one or more of any characters special attacks. Wonder Woman soars into the air and hurls swords at the entire opposing team, Green Arrow would have a sequence where he shot exploding arrows into the air to devastate the opposition. It’s a minor touch, but if you’re a comic book fan will definitely appeal to you. While it doesn’t make up for a lack of voice acting or real story cinematics of any kind, it does show how much research the studio put into these characters.

Like any RPG, the minutia of strategy makes up the meat of this mobile game experience. There are several different classes of characters from mystical, energy, and fighters. Then the trees begin to really splinter as every character possess several unique identifiable items to further boost, such as Sinestro having a yellow power battery or Wonder Woman getting her lasso.

DC Legends single player campaign is based on the Blackest Night storyline created by Geoff Johns. Though it doesn’t relate directly to any of the events in the comics, it borrows the premise of the Black Lantern Corps turning DC Comics characters into Black Lanterns you’ll have to fight to save. Just like the original saga, the big boss of the game is Nekron, which players will have to devote days of playing during restaurant waits or public transportation commutes just to get to and have a team leveled up enough to beat him.

Full disclosure, I’m not much for mobile gaming. There’s a large segment of people out there who are. Why else would companies continue to devote valuable resources to games like these? The brief time I spent with DC Legends was rather enjoyable. While it shares the typical unlikable tropes of mobile games like grinding and only being able to play a handful of turns before it asks you to either wait or pay money; there is a charm that WB Games gets right about these characters here. That alone makes the game worth adding to the excruciating list of apps on your phone. If you’re a casual gamer and avid comic book reader you’ll enjoy the game. Best of all, ANYONE can download this and play it. That’s not meant in a marketing paraphrase; I mean that on the most technical level. I played this game on an Android phone that cost me $15 and it ran smoothly. Your fancy iPhones and exploding galaxies should be just fine.

Looking for a good time waster for your phone or something to distract you from the flaming dumpster fire the country has become this week then why not step in and build a team of DC Characters we love based on the last time DC Comics got a big event right. DC Legends is free to download and play from the Android or iOS app stores now.