Quick Look: Dragon Age – Legends

A man needs to have quite a few friends on Facebook to be able to fully engage with and enjoy Dragon Age: Legends, the new Flash-based social game that BioWare has launched on the social platform in order to accompany Dragon Age 2.

At first sight, the game looks pretty similar to the Flash-based experience that was delivered alongside Origins, but after a rather short and at times confusing tutorial (arrows should always point at game elements that are really visible in the interface), it quickly becomes clear that gamers need to send out some invites in order to experience all that Legends has to offer.

The structure of the game is not too hard to understand and the tutorial should be informative even for those who don't yet know anything about the Dragon Age franchise.

Legends ditches the hex-based battle system of Journeys and adopts a simpler one, based on position and on alternate attack turns for both sides.

The health and mana system is also less complex, but the game makes up by making it more important for teams to work together and tackle the most important enemy threat as quickly as possible.

It's easy to see how much damage a character will do to a creature and simple to estimate when a potion is needed to enable more special attacks or to get health up before another wave of enemies.

The main limitation to enjoyment comes from the need to create a party to tackle the battles.

All characters, both those invited from the friends list and some of them provided for by Dragon Age: Legends, have cool-down times before they can be used again and the player needs to pay in Crowns in order to be activated sooner.

The Crowns, which can also be used for other items, cost real-world money, and probably quite a number of Legends players will quit playing when Facebook pops a message asking for credit card information.