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Review: We Are Legion – An RTS without Unit Caps

We_Are_Legion_game - Choke Points map
Review: We Are Legion – An RTS without Unit Caps
2.5

Platforms: Windows PC, Steam

Game Name: We Are Legion

Publisher: Pwnee Studios

Developer: Pwnee Studios

Release Date: August 7th, 2015

We Are Legion – What We Think:

With We Are Legion, from indie developer Pwnee Studios, the aspiration is that – unlike Warcraft or even Starcraft – you aren’t limited to the number of units you can control or move, but instead, you can spawn and mobilize as many fricken’ soldiers as your CPU can handle until it melts down.

Pwnee may be best known for their relentlessly hair-raising platformer Cloudberry Kingdom – a procedurally generated challenger with infinite levels. In other words, they design games that aren’t afraid of ripping the lid off and throwing it down the well.

We_Are_Legion_screenshot-four_swarms
Swarms flood the screen – We Are Legion – screenshot courtesy Steam.

Get Busy Chile

We tested WAL with four IGR staffers, including InfinityWaltz, Adam Fimio and HappyWulf. Happy – our resident RTS expert – quickly took the lead, spawning hordes of pixelated clones rapidly deployed to thwack my Dragon Lord before I had even laid down a gold mining facility.

I quickly figured out that stashing my Dragon Lord in some hard to reach part of the map (camouflaged and reinforced by a healthy regiment of clones) was a good opening move.

We_Are_Legion_screenshot-resources
Grab those resources! We Are Legion screenshot

Another good move was to send a scout group within proximity of jade deposits to lay down a jade-mining unit. This afforded me a Nuke spell, skeleton armies, a necromancer or an army of Terracotta warriors. Dropping any of these can turn the tides of war quickly – wars which should be executed without hesitation and with all the foresight you can muster at once.

InfinityWaltz took a different approach: “Instead of going after jade to do magic or whatever, I just went for gold mines and did Zerg rushes as fast as I could.”

I have to admit, he did beat me, using this tactic in a 1v1 round we played after the others left.

Spam Spam Spammity Spam

I noticed, in a map called Choke Points, that zerg-ing isn’t quite as straightforward as one may expect or hope. The throngs of warriors seem to have some kind of AI built in, but it is not very bright and comes with some conditions. For example, if they bunch up at a choke point, they won’t just filter through like sand in an hourglass; you must select the closest/outermost row, send it through and then rinse and repeat. This is about as much fun as data entry on a spreadsheet.

We_Are_Legion_game - Choke Points map
The Choke Points map in We Are Legion showcases just how unintelligent your troops really are.

Besides that, you can spawn a barrack basically anywhere, so once you have your troops in proximity of the enemy Dragon Lord, you can just spam barracks around them. Unfortunately, the tool set for annihilation ends there; there are no tech trees or alternate unit types besides the ones available at first look. There is no solo mode or tutorial (well, there is a tutorial map), and in looking for public games at the WAL servers, I found exactly none, a month into commercial release.

HappyWulf said “You’d be better off playing Agar.io – there was more strategy in the Starcraft Zone control mods. And that’s basically what this is, just not as good. Which is bad, because almost everyone has Starcraft these days, and you can just pop in that UseMapSettings map any day.” And with that, he spit out his coffee and slammed the door behind him.

Straight, No Chaser

Yes, watching the growing hordes of pixels spread across the map is awe-inducing at first, but once the novelty wears off, there is scarce little content there to keep it humming, leaving WAL feeling more like a screensaver type novelty than a strategy game in earnest. At US$17.00, this title is way overpriced. I would like to recommend it, but there simply isn’t enough there at present to merit more than a few trial games among friends, maybe as a test of your CPU.

We Are Legion – Official site

Get We Are Legion on Steam

[xrr rating=”2.5/5″]

Watch the trailer for We Are Legion below: