The Power Rangers movie released alongside two licensed tie-in video games. The first game, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Mega Battle, is a side-scrolling beat ’em up that received low review scores. The second game is Power Rangers: Legacy Wars and is rather decent, but that is the key word: decent. Several design choices work; some don’t, and a few make me tilt my head and ask, “What were they thinking?”
The Good
Power Rangers: Legacy Wars is a fighting game, not unlike Kabam’s Marvel: Contest of Champions. While most mobile fighting games make players attack by repeatedly tapping the middle of the screen, gamers attack in Legacy Wars by tapping ability cards. Each ability is different: some are fast and weak; some are slow and strong; some are melee; some are ranged, and some are blocks/counters. Some abilities can even be strung together to form combos. Furthermore, the attacks follow a “rock, paper, scissors” system: weak attacks cancel strong attacks; strong attacks break through blocks, and blocks prevent weak attacks. No two attacks have the same windup, hitbox, or animation. Moreover, each character uses his or her iconic weapons. Finally, Legacy Wars channels AAA team-based fighters by letting players supplement their main character with allies. While limited to one main character and two allies, players can still create their dream team of Power Rangers, including a Forever Red-themed team.
The progression in Power Rangers: Legacy Wars is what people might expect from a mobile game, but slightly more lenient. As with many mobile games, players can only unlock characters by collecting shards that either can be bought directly in the in-game store with coins or earned through Morph Boxes. All boxes come in various rarities and are mostly earned by winning matches, but players also have the option of opening free Morph Boxes and Corrupted Boxes. Every four hours, players can open a free Morph Box, and Corrupted Boxes are earned through dealing damage in matches. Even players with horrible losing streaks can eventually open a Corrupted Box. Very few mobile games give participation awards, daily login rewards notwithstanding.
The Bad
Despite my praise for Power Rangers: Legacy Wars’ fighting system, it is ironically also the worst aspect of the game. The system is luck- based, and players can easily find themselves backed into a corner because their opponent is lucky enough to draw numerous knockback and/or juggling ability cards. The vast majority of my losses were the result of my opponents lucking out this exact way when I could not draw any block ability cards. The system’s reliance on luck rather than skill brings the game down.
As with many mobile games, Power Rangers: Legacy Wars has a heavy pay-to-win aspect. Players who have more money than time can buy numerous Morph Boxes to power up their characters by obscene amounts. However, the most egregious pay-to-win part of the game is that the most popular Power Ranger in history, the original Green Ranger Tommy Oliver, is locked behind a limited-time $10 paywall. As of writing this article, the Green Ranger cannot be earned through Morph Boxes, which gives the game a very “haves and have nots” feel, one I am constantly reminded of every time I see a player with that character. Also, I am fairly certain that the Green Ranger is overpowered and gives players who use him an unfair advantage.
The Questionable
Power Rangers: Legacy Wars is PvP only. I am on the fence about the game’s PvP exclusivity, because I do not know if it is a questionable or a genuinely bad design choice. Granted, nothing is wrong with a PvP only game, but every one of my matches had varying degrees of lag. I encountered several instances when the game no longer responded; it did not crash, but I could no longer move my character, and ability cards did not activate in a timely fashion. Furthermore, the game opens with a story cutscene, but the lack of a single player mode prevents the story from going anywhere. Of course, a future patch that adds a single player mode could easily fix this problem.
While Power Rangers: Legacy Wars is supposed to be a celebration of the entire Power Rangers franchise, the game is somewhat lacking in characters, both playable and allies. Primarily, the game contains characters from the movie and the first season of Power Rangers, and most other seasons receive one or two characters. For example, the Blue Dino Charge Ranger is both a playable character and an ally, yet the loading screen prominently features the Violet Dino Charge Ranger. Furthermore, numerous seasons do not receive any representation, especially the seasons that have three Ranger teams. Finally, the game has little in the way of non-Ranger characters. Goldar, Psycho Red, Snide, and the 2017 movie version of Rita Repulsa are all playable (and Xandred is available as an ally), but Ninjor, Magna Defender, Mesagog, King Mondo, and many others are absent from the game. Most egregious of all, even though Lord Zedd’s throne room is a stage in the game, Lord Zedd is nowhere to be seen. However, a future patch or patches could easily add these characters, and I might be in the minority when say this, but I hope the game adds Ivan Ooze from the 1995 Power Rangers movie.
Very rarely can I say a movie tie-in mobile game is better than a much more high-profile, non-mobile movie tie-in game, but Power Rangers: Legacy Wars managed to surprise me. The game might be flawed, but it tries to set itself apart from other mobile fighting games, which is something I can appreciate.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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