RAID: Shadow Legends

Review by eFreeware

If you like the idea of assembling a roster of fantasy warriors, equipping them piece by piece and then watching a plan come together in a turn-based fight, RAID: Shadow Legends is built for exactly that. It is a free role-playing game from Plarium Global Ltd in which you summon Champions, level them up and send them into dungeons, a story campaign and player-versus-player battles. The install numbers are large, over 50 million, and the average rating sits at 4.6 from more than two million ratings, so plenty of people have stayed with it.

What appeals to me most from the developer's outline is the sheer amount of tinkering available. There are more than 800 Champions spread across 16 factions, and the developer puts the number of possible Champion builds at over a million. That is the sort of figure that suggests a game you chip away at over months rather than something you finish in a weekend.

The catch, and it is worth stating up front, is that this is a free game with in-app purchases, including items sold as random. I would go in expecting to be nudged toward spending at some point. If that structure puts you off, that reaction is reasonable, and it is the main thing to weigh before downloading.

A dark fantasy world called Teleria

The setting is a dark fantasy realm, Teleria, under the thumb of a dark lord named Siroth. You play the part of a commander raising a band of immortal warriors to push back his legions. It is familiar ground for the genre, but the game leans into it with a fair amount of world building.

There are 12 locations in the story campaign, and the developer says the campaign is fully voiced. Alongside that, the game keeps a growing collection of Champion bios, so the characters you pull from summons have some written background rather than being anonymous stat blocks. There is also a cartoon series on YouTube, RAID: Call of the Arbiter, which is an odd extra for a mobile RPG and one way to get more out of the setting if the lore appeals to you.

The presentation is a selling point in its own right. The heroes are rendered in 3D, and the developer describes the detail as reaching down to cracks in armor, with thousands of skill and attack animations across the roster. I would treat that as the pitch it is, but a large animation library is the kind of thing that keeps battles from looking identical after the hundredth fight.

How a session actually unfolds

The core loop is turn-based combat. You pick a team of Champions, take them into a fight, and trade turns with the opposition, using skills, area-of-effect attacks and magic. Between battles you equip artifacts, which are the main way you shape how a Champion performs, and you rank them up to open stronger abilities.

Dungeons are where a lot of that gear comes from. Bosses such as the Magma Dragon, the Fire Knight and the Ice Golem wait there, and beating them yields loot, experience and special Champion drops. You go back and fight them again for better equipment, which sets the intended rhythm: run the same encounter repeatedly, improve your team, push a little further.

Your base, the Bastion, is the management layer over all of this. Upgrading it lets you handle Shards and prepare Champions for dungeons, the Arena and the campaign. Shards are the summoning resource, so the Bastion is effectively where you organize before heading out. It is not the most glamorous part of the game, but it is the part that decides how smoothly everything else goes.

The campaign itself is the structured path through the world, spread over those 12 locations. It gives the roster somewhere to grow against predictable opposition before you start meeting other players.

Clans, tournaments and the Arena

Once you have a team worth fielding, the competitive side opens up. The Arena is turn-based player-versus-player combat where you take your Champions up against other players' teams, with special gear as the reward and a ranking ladder to climb. Because both sides are working from the same turn-based rules, matches come down to team composition and tactics rather than reflexes.

Clans add a cooperative layer. Clans let you team up against challenges such as the Demon Lord and compete in tournaments. That combination of fighting alongside a group and then measuring that group against another is a large part of what keeps a game like this running for years.

The recent 11.80.0 update touches several of these systems: it adds Relic Craft and Upgrade objectives to Clan-versus-Clan tournaments, rebalances health, attack and defense stats for certain factions on Faction Wars hard stages 1 through 21, widens the reward window during Doom Tower auto-climb so all rewards are visible, and includes a Champion rebalance along with other fixes. Stat rebalancing is a normal part of keeping a roster this size in line, though it does mean a team that performs well today can shift in value later.

Costs, purchases and what is free

RAID: Shadow Legends is free to download and shows no advertising. That is a cleaner setup than many free games.

The money side comes through in-app purchases. The developer's own notice states that items are available to buy, that some of those items are random, and that certain paid items may not be refundable depending on what they are. Random items are the part I would think hardest about: you are paying for a chance at something rather than a known quantity, and the value you get can vary from one purchase to the next.

I would not call this an obstacle to playing. The game has been running since February 2019 and has had more than five years of free content updates according to the developer, so the free path clearly exists and is kept current. The sensible approach is to treat any spending as part of the hobby rather than a requirement, and to be comfortable with the randomness before you commit money.

Where the appeal wears thin

The honest trade-off with a game this deep is time. More than 800 Champions, artifact sets, rank-ups, a Bastion to develop, dungeons to farm and a ladder to climb add up to a lot of systems, and learning how they fit together takes patience. That complexity is the point for some players and a wall for others.

The random element in paid items is the other thing I would flag. It is disclosed plainly, which is to its credit, but it shapes how the game feels if you are the sort of person who likes to know exactly what a purchase gets you.

None of this is a flaw in execution so much as a description of what the game is. It is a long-haul RPG with a competitive layer and a spending layer attached, and it makes no secret of either.

A long-haul RPG for team builders

RAID: Shadow Legends is worth installing if you enjoy turn-based combat where preparation matters as much as the fight itself, and if the idea of slowly assembling a roster from a pool of hundreds appeals to you. The campaign gives you a structured route through the world, dungeons give you a reason to keep improving gear, and the Arena and Clan tournaments give you somewhere to test the result against other players.

It suits players who are happy to return to a game regularly over a long period and who can accept a free-to-play structure with in-app purchases, including random ones. If you want a self-contained RPG you can finish and set aside, or you know that random paid items will bother you, the shape of this one will not sit right.

For everyone else, there is a lot here: a big voiced campaign, a deep roster, cooperative Clan play and a competitive ladder, all free to download. It has been going since 2019 and is still being updated, which for a game of this type is the strongest signal that the content keeps coming.

What's new in version 11.80.0

New in 11.80.0: FEATURES: - Added Relic Craft & Upgrade objectives to CvC Tournaments. - Rebalanced HP, ATK & DEF stats for selected Factions on Faction Wars Hard Stages 1-21. - Expanded reward window to show all rewards during Doom Tower Auto-Climb. - Champion rebalance. - Other game enhancements & fixes.