Zoids: Legacy Review (no fat)

Game Description

Waking up in a foreign land filled with Lego-like, Transformers may not be everyone's idea for a great way to start the day but that is how Zoids: Legacy begins. As a boy named Zeru, you wander into a village and start learning more about Zoids and tournaments involving these mech robots.

Soon enough, Zeru gets involved in a tournament with a robot given to him from a scientist. He meets a girl named Juno at the tournament, who is new to this world and also has amnesia. She gets kidnapped and you end up chasing her around from village to village. As the chase goes on you learn of a “big bang” that has distorted time and space. You basically try to gather as many Zoids as possible to save the world.

Zoids: Legacy - Gameplay

Finding parts for your Zoids is easy. You receive data crystals and other parts left behind when you win a battle. Once you gather enough items you can visit and town and start putting together your masterpiece. In town, you can also repair, modify, and upgrade the weapons, armor, or power settings. The basic Zoid attacks use their claws, fangs, and tails. Then you can find parts such as plasma cannons, missile sensors, armor plating, and many more to improve various stats. The size of your Zoid also affects how many weapons you can put on it.

Zoids: Legacy Combats

The battlefields can become a hectic place as the fights get as big as six-on-six if you have enough parts and pilots to go around. Both, parts and pilots, are found all throughout the game so you shouldn’t have a problem finding either one.

The field is separated into a 2x3 grid on each side. The front row is for hand-to-hand combat as well as any extra weapons, but the back row is exclusive to long range weapon users. There are lots of factors and strategies that involve whether to place a Zoid in the front or back row like evasion percentage, speed bonus, etc.

The actual combat is simple enough. It’s organized into rounds of turns, and before each round you can use a deck command. These are similar to special powers which you can use that will give all your Zoids a bonus or give you extra materials at the end of the battle. Your deck commands change depending on which characters you recruit.

During each turn you have three options to choose from unless you have an “organoid”. Organoids are carried by certain characters and they fuse with a Zoid to greatly improve its attributes. Then you will have four options – attack, wait and gain HP, use item, and organoid. The strategy is in where you place your Zoids and of course how you customize them.

Zoids: Legacy - The Technicalities

Customizing your Zoids is the name of the game. Not to mention, traveling through 40 different towns that spread across three different continents. There are a total of 151 Zoids to collect and modify with different weapons and colors. The game gives you three different modes to play: Story Mode (about 30 hours), Challenge Mode (50 exponentially tough battles), and Multiplayer Mode (use a link cable and two copies of the game to trade Zoids, Zoid Parts, and battle a friend).

Zoids: Legacy – Summing Up

Zoids is a simple game that’s easy to learn for anyone. If you like customizing big robotic monsters, then you’ll enjoy this well enough. Most of the time you’re either in a lab working with your Zoids or finding a battle to test your Zoids. Gathering Zoids and talk to random people in between is a RPG element that is a tad underdeveloped, if anything.

Zoids is most likely a good game for fans of Pokemon. There’s not much to the plot and, other than the battles, there’s not much to please the eyes and ears. In the end, customizing Zoids and finding new characters and parts can be entertaining enough for Pokemon fanatics.

Zoids: Legacy - Cost

Zoids: Legacy currently retails for $29.99US at the time of writing.