

There is a good couple of hours of mindless happy-slashing in that, so it's totally worth the free download. The King of Bling: but is he an early boss, or the guy who thought up the game's micropayment system? Pocket Legends has taken the brave decision to be ostensibly free to play, allowing you to duff up as many skeletons, zombies and guard thingies as you like, but setting a level cap of 10 and limiting you to the first 13 five-minute dungeon chunks. Or, more like, play random segments of over and over and over again until you're high enough level to survive the next set of dungeons.Īnd to access the next set of dungeons, you'll need to spend extra money. There are no quests, each set of dungeons instead being chopped into neat but generic little pieces which you can play in any order you want. You disappear somewhere to blindly kill things, then return to an unchanged situation. With everything compartmentalised and instanced, there's no sense of flow.

Go to dungeon, incessantly hit a couple of buttons until everything in dungeon is dead, go to town, buy better stuff, go to dungeon. You'll have a very clear picture of the scope and scale of the game within ten minutes of picking it up. Unfortunately, repetition is in Pocket Legends' bones. That extra 'e' means you're in a fantasy game, kids. Simplicity, both on a practical and technical level, is obviously key to getting this ambition working on an iPhone, but seeing the same three faces appear again and again does add a certain sterility to the cartoon charm the game shoots for. There's the fighter (a bear), the archer (a bird), and the enchantress (an elf - is Pocket Legends suggesting elves are no better than animals? Racist!). You've a choice of three character classes. It's much more a multiplayer Diablo than a pocket World of Warcraft - but that's an impressive enough achievement in itself. Instead, its hub is a server browser, a list of instanced missions which you can jump into in pursuit of wealth and power.

It's not a large open world filled with thousands of players going about their business, however. It's a cheery little online-only dungeon-crawler, best played in groups, with levelling and looting and trading and endless tap-tap-tapping (hence the Claw). Is it really possible to play an MMO on an iPhone? Pocket Legends says yes - as long as you're happy to redefine what you mean by "MMO". I never knew my index finger could kill so many skeletons. This time, though, it's my phone's fault. They hurt in a way they haven't for years, not since my long days in Azeroth circa 2006-2008.
