Chronicle: Runescape Legends – The Old Video Gamer’s Review

Story:

Chronicle: RuneScape Legends is an online collectible card game based on the characters of RuneScape, an online multiplayer role playing game. RuneScape takes place in the medieval fantasy world of Gielinor, populated by damsels in distress, righteous knights, foul gouls, and blood sucking female vampyres with Romanian sounding names. Runescape Legends grandly promises a battle of wits where lives are gambled on the turns of cards.

Playability: Duelling cards

RuneScape Legends tutorial wastes little time in introducing you to the basics of attack, armour, health points and booster cards. Each player creates an adventure for his/her own hero (called legend) chosen from the usual roster of paladin, thief, ranger, mage, assassin, necromancer. The adventure is played out over five different chapters. In each chapter, four cards comprising enemies (dragons, golems, zombies, automatons, bouncers and even bunnies…) or support (cards dispensing gold, armour, health and other beneficial spells) are played. Each legend starts with thirty health points. A player loses the game when the legend dies. If both legends are alive at the end of the adventure, a final battle occurs.

Annoyance: Pay for truly legendary and epic cards

Unless you have a lot of time on your hands (you’ve retired from a successful career or you’re still in primary school with little to no homework), you will only be able to slowly progress battling similarly low level players and earning measly copper coins to purchase card decks. Fortunately, epic and legendary DLCs are available for extra gold (the dollar or euro kind in your real life bank account). For those wishing to collect all available cards (more than three hundred to date) RuneScape Legends is a game that honours grinding to the playable limits.

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Beauty: Animations cut short

Card battles in RuneScape Legends take place in 3D rendered landscapes from pop up dusty tomes (or from your children’s books). Your opponent (usually a rather ugly looking fellow or dame) stares you down from the other side of the board, occasionally taunting you with the same limited set of recorded exclamations. While your opponents’ expressions of surprise or intense cogitation are initially amusing, the rather wooden animations of pawns and cards have a slapdash repetitive character.

The Old Video Gamer’s Prattle: Let’s play a real board game instead 5/10

RuneScape Legends follows in the well trodden path of dungeon flavoured online collectible card games. Trying too hard to emulate the benighted and adulated Blizzard’s Hearthstone, Chronicle: Runescape Legends misses the opportunity to innovate much aside from its mouthful title. Crafting an adventure for the player’s hero is exciting but gets lost in peripheral card collecting, daily side quests and arena style battles. The dreaded micro transaction based fremium model (sometimes derided as pay to win) will attempt to make your part with your hard earned real life gold against decks that might contain famed uncommon cards. Quick matches provide a little distraction between important tasks in one’s daily work routine, but unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money Runescape Legends quickly becomes repetitive. Animations in the style of a real board game will indeed make you wish for the real board game instead.