About Legends Of Speed:
I’m not one to review games because I really don’t care – I just play what I like and other folks should do the same, but I thought it’d be nice to give my 2 cents on this game. Overview: SOLO is a greatly underrated and unadvertised game. It’s a hodgepodge of concepts and systems taken from other MMOs that lends itself to a more casual audience than anything else. It certainly does nothing to innovate the genre and is still, more or less, a theme park. But I personally like theme parks and repetitive gameplay loops. It’s perfect for folks like me with demanding job hours as well as altoholics. It has great combat and content that’ll keep you interested. PROS: Combat – Low skill floor, decently high skill ceiling. Easy enough to get into but requires a little bit of thinking if you’d like to optimize how you play. Action/Tab target hybrid similar to TERA, ESO, and BNS. SOLO’s combat seems to be a mixed bag for a lot of people but I personally really like it. It’s buttery smooth and you don’t have a bloated rotation made up of 10 skill bars. Visuals – This is something that isn’t too big of a deal for me since I’m the sort of player to play a potato provided it has great gameplay, but SOLO definitely looks great for a game originally developed in 2017. Everything and everyone is so pretty to a fault which I’ll get to later. PvE Content – Having been released 3-4 years ago, SOLO has a bunch of backlog content that is slowly (or rapidly, depending on perspective), being released every 2 weeks. Rather than outright expansions, it seems to be going the Destiny 2 route of seasonal content releases and battle passes. The progression treadmill is straightforward and easy follow, with all loot drops following a personal loot system similar to post-MoP WoW. It’s so forgiving that I can find no fault in it. Having said that, raids and dungeons are of average difficulty, being easy for MMO veterans like myself and challenging enough for any greenhorn. Regardless of how one feels about it, it does have some of the most unique mechanics I’ve seen in any MMO before and, with the release of Ice World and Nuowu, I’m positive that encounters will just get better and better. Other activities – If you’re not really into no-lifing either PvE or PvP, there’s still a bunch of stuff for more casual players to do like housing, treasure hunting, card games, and life skills like gathering or fishing. Housing here is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game and, honestly, I’d follow this game into the abyss just for that. Treasure hunting is a nifty little activity where you uncover lore items, toys, housing items, cosmetics, and other such things, or uncover treasure chests using treasure maps that hold the same. The card game is pretty fun as well, though, admittedly, I don’t really do much of it save for the daily for it. Cash Shop: Nothing P2W, enough said. Everything is cosmetic only. Admittedly, prices for cosmetics can be outrageous. However, to a degree, I understand why they would be. This version of SOLO is buy-to-play but in TW/CN, this game has an HOURLY subscription fee. I don’t know the exact number but it’s along the lines of 11 cents USD per hour. At the rate me and my friends play this game, we’ve pretty much found out that we’d be paying 40 USD a month with that sort of subscription system. Cosmetics in the TW/CN servers are MUCH cheaper but I think this is only because of the existence of the subscription fee. For our version, they’re more expensive because we don’t have subscriptions. And, to be honest, that’s quite fine. The game’s gotta keep on trudging along somehow, right? Still, I’m in the camp that some of the cosmetics are overpriced, so I’ll just be buying what I think is reasonable. I can’t really complain about it but I can’t praise it either. PvP – No idea as I never touch it in any MMO. CONS Connectivity Issues – Unless you live in the East Coast/Virginia, where the the server is located, you’ll have pretty bad ping. It’s far from unplayable as some folks would claim, but it certainly isn’t good. Especially coming from me who plays over in the SEA/OCE region who is at a constant 220-300ms, it’s especially bad. But this might just be me and my group of friends – we’re very used to playing with bad ping in almost every non-OCE server MMO we play and have simply gotten used to it. I’d like to think I perform very well, regardless of my ping issues as I normally do in other MMOs. So this, if you’re like us, won’t be an issue. However, the worst part is just the bad Microsoft servers this game has. rubberbanding can be intense and has killed me on multiple occassions in boss encounters before. Not too often, but happens enough to tilt me sometimes. Same with my ping just exploding to 999+ for a couple of seconds then dipping back down to normalcy. I don’t mind the server being on the U.S. east coast but, at the very least, Gameforge has to get some better servers. It’s downright disgusting that mars the great game underneath it. World – While it looks great, it certainly doesn’t feel like a “world.” It has the same form of zones that FFXIV or ESO have, but far less expansive. It doesn’t feel as big as it should be and, with flying, it certainly does feel pretty small. Even with future zones opening up, they’re not that plentiful either and feels similar to how I view Destiny 2’s universe – just lacking. So if you’re looking for a game where you can just go explore, SOLO is definitely not it outside of treasure hunting. Translations – These are just so bad. From the voice acting to tool tip text, it can be quite off-putting and confusing, leading to a bad understanding of the game. Better to play with the original Chinese voice acting and crowdsource for info instead. It’s slowly being improved, but this really mars the image of a really good game. Community: The game’s community isn’t something to write home about. A lot of world chat is just filled with toxic folks that are just absolutely bursting at the seams with negativity for whatever reason. Don’t get me wrong – not everybody is like that and I have met a lot of good people. With that said, it’s like I’m playing LOL, Overwatch, or Dota 2’s SEA servers with some of my encounters with the colorful folks of the US server. I’m not sure why these sorts of people gravitated towards SOLO and stayed, but seeing world chat for the first time in SOLO can be jarring and off-putting to new people. I suggest you find a guild of good people and stick with them. Just make friends along the way and, believe me, there’s still a lot of us, that you can do stuff with. I personally just did this and ignore world chat in general. Population and Queues: At the time of this writing, there’s a small, but dedicated, playbase. I play with some real life friends and there’s never an issue with us running content. However, for a solo player, it may be difficult. Queue times basically take forever as most people prefer using the group recruitment tool. Not to mention, the positive part of the game being casual friendly is also what’s hurting it. Most people that finish their dailies/weeklies just log off until the next reset, so there’s less and less people playing the later it is in the week. Closing: SOLO is a great game and it’s definitely worth your time if you primarily love PvE themeparks. It’s great for the casual and working crowd,. This isn’t your game if you want to no-life something although you certainly still can, but you do need to want to do something more than just raiding or arenas. I feel it’s so underrated and misunderstood, and the only thing holding it back is Gameforge. One can only hope that the devs get sick of them and drop them as publisher to give to another that’ll take care of the game better.
