The Pokémon series includes some of the most popular releases for portable gaming systems of all time, but despite Nintendo's continued reluctance to dabble in the smartphone market, we've yet to see a suitable clone come to iOS. With Monster Legacy, developer Outplay hopes to change all that. Its scrappy pet-battling game is so reminiscent of Nintendo's original, in fact, that the main differences center around execution and setting than with gameplay.
Indeed, the broad strokes are the same. A young boy or girl serves as the hero, the whole business of capturing critters and making them fight remains, and monster evolution makes the cut as well. You even get to hunt for wild monsters in the grass, and a mage-like "Mentor" stands in for good ol' Professor Oak. The differences emerge once you realize you're not jaunting about the countryside competing for awards; you're tasked with saving the world of Arborea from a grumpy chap called Ardur.
But the bigger differences spring from the payment mode. Monster Legacy is a free-to-play game, which means that opportunities to use premium gems for microtransactions pop up around almost every corner. You find them in the usual places, such as the boosts needed to speed up the construction of buildings on your ranch, but you also find them in more controversial spots, such as the 100% chance traps for catching monsters or for health potions and spells used in the thick of combat. A risky venture, yes, but I couldn't see where it negatively affected my experience during the couple of hours I played.
It also helps that Monster Legacy captures the Pokémon experience quite well. Based on my time with the game, the battles are fast and filled with spells that require tapping the screen at a precise moment for maximum effectiveness, and the diverse assortment of creatures allows for fun battles even in the early levels. Arborea, though coated in a cutesy aesthetic that lightly recalls Facebook social games, is a lovely place to explore, and more than 70 quests await you in its wilds.
Monster Legacy, in short, is about as close to a true Pokémon game on iOS as we're likely to get for a while, and thus it's well worth a look when it launches for iPhone and iPad on Thursday, March 20.
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