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Way of Retribution: Legend of Abyss Review: Broken Souls

13K View2022-04-29

In many ways, the story of mobile gaming has been a story of overcoming expectations. Anyone who plays games on their phone has heard—and probably at one point or another even thought—about the limitations of the form. “A shooter? That will never work on such a tiny screen!” “Platformers require too much precision to work with touch controls!” “Racing sims are too graphics- and performance-intensive to ever fit onto a smartphone!”

One by one, each of these “common sense” tenets has been knocked down. Mobile devices, it turns out, can be a totally reasonable platform for a wide variety of video game styles. However, there’s one type of game—one of my favorites, in fact—that has yet to properly make the transition to phones: the Souls-like.

Way of Retribution: Legend of the Abyss is the second in developer Lib’s series of mobile RPGs that are clearly and openly inspired by the hardcore gameplay and dark fantasy of From Software’s Dark Souls series (or their most recent release, Elden Ring). Like those popular titles, Legend of Abyss equips players with swords, axes, spears, and a bevy of magic spells and sets them against a dangerous world full of demonic enemies. Deaths come frequently and quickly, and they’re punished with the loss of experience points.

Unfortunately, the broad strokes are where the similarities between Legend of Abyss and Dark Souls end. The games that Legend of the Abyss models itself after are all about deliberate movement through deadly environments, about carefully choosing when to make your move. You die a lot, sure, but if you pay attention, you can learn from those deaths. This game offers no such possibilities for learning, and no real incentive for being considered in your approach.

The first, most obvious, and most glaring problem with Legend of Abyss is its combat. Tense fights with bad guys that can often take down your whole health bar in just a few hits—that’s the kind of stressful scenario that Souls-likes are all about. Legend of Abyss has a camera lock-on that works surprisingly well, and movement feels relatively responsive, but the attacks themselves—the best word that I can think of to describe them is mushy. When my giant sword connected with an enemy soldier, it never felt like steel colliding with flesh or clanging off of armor. It felt more like swinging a giant spoon into a wall of cold butter; no impact, just a soft, vaguely uncomfortable squishiness.

The lack of weight to attacks extends to enemies as well. If Legend of Abyss’s enemies are capable of staggering players out of attacks, I never experienced it. So rather than the psychological game of “who will screw up and provide an opening first?” that many Souls-like combat encounters turn into, the fights here play out more like a button-mashing hack-n-slash. I ended up just running up to most enemies, tapping the attack button as fast as I could to take them out before they could do much damage.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with hack-n-slash games! I’ve been loving Torchlight: Infinite lately, for example. It’s just a style that feels totally out of place and ill-conceived here.

Notably, the majority of the enemies I encountered in Legend of Abyss didn’t do much damage. It’s the handful of bosses and mini-bosses scattered across the levels that caused a lot more trouble in that respect. Even when I was well above game’s recommended level for an area, I found that certain overpowered enemies had the ability to kill me with just a handful of well-placed blows.

That’s closer to the kind of combat I was just praising in Souls games, right? Well, kind of. But again, because there’s no reliable way to stagger enemies, these fights turned into a grueling marathon of running into range to take a swing or two, rolling back out of range as quickly as possible, and mashing down healing items before repeating the process over and over again.

Oh, that rolling back out of range step? That one is especially painful as well. Without a controller, Legend of Abyss assigns dodging—one of the absolute quintessential Souls-like abilities—to a tiny virtual button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. It’s tucked away just below the much larger attack button, and not far from the special ability buttons.

Call it user error or a case of fat thumbs if you want, but I cannot begin to quantify how many times I tried to tap at the dodge button during a phone-clenching boss battle, only to see my character take another swing or two instead of moving away. I don’t know of an easy fix for this problem, but I can’t imagine worse placement for a button that is so integral to survival.

Another important part of surviving in a Souls game is thoroughly exploring the world, watching out for death traps, and uncovering treasure that can make you more powerful. Legend of Abyss’s level design is probably the closest it gets to matching the feel of a Souls game, but even then it’s not really close at all. The game has nine main environments right now, with presumably more to be added in the future, but almost all of those areas turn into fairly generic fantasy castles.

Worse, those castles often break down into long runs down generic corridors. Legend of Abyss gets the sense of scale right; like any good From Software game, there were moments here where I looked out across a level, saw some tower way off in the distance, and knew that I would probably end up exploring that area later, and sure enough, I did.

But the journey between those spaces was full of long slogs through boring, nondescript hallways and courtyards, with enemies scattered around seemingly at random. There’s only the faintest hint of the thoughtful design that makes exploring feel so exhilarating in Souls games.

Legend of Abyss also implements a much less satisfying approach to progression than its inspiration. My character gained levels at a frankly astonishing rate, zooming from level 1 to almost level 40 in just a few hours of play. The trade-off is that the stat gains provided by levels seem to make less of an impact. Instead, players are seemingly meant to focus on upgrading their armor and weapons. Actual new weapon drops only appear rarely—mostly through exceedingly bland and optional castle assault missions—so the real power spike comes in the form of using materials to upgrade your gear at the blacksmith.

Here’s where the most insidious part of Legend of Abyss becomes clear: Though you can certainly play through it without paying any real money, this game is absolutely designed to urge microtransactions out of people along several very gross vectors. The blacksmith is the worst offender, as the game uses that aggravating, cash-grab system where each time you upgrade there is only a chance that the upgrade will work. If it fails, the weapon or armor you were attempting to approve drops back down to its base form.

So you might sink a bunch of materials into making your favorite sword +10, but when you get greedy and try for +11, it fails. Suddenly you’re left with a weaker weapon and all the materials (and the time you put into gathering them) wasted. And what’s the easiest way to get more materials quickly to get your sword back in shape? You guessed it: buying them with an in-game currency purchased with real money. Just awful.

That’s not all of course. You can also use that currency to buy materials to upgrade your healing flask (that one, thankfully, does not drop back down to base level when an upgrade fails), restock on arrows, refill your experience multiplier so that leveling doesn’t slow to a crawl, or even to just buy what is presumably the best weapons and armor available in the game. It’s one of the most blatant pay-to-win economies that I’ve seen in a game in quite some time, and even if that weren’t bad enough on its own, this is precisely the worst possible type of game to implement that junk within.

It’s obvious that the creators of Way of Retribution: Legend of Abyss have a lot of fondness for the Dark Souls series and other games like them. And it’s precisely because of that fondness that all of this game’s shortcomings feel all the more egregious. I don’t think making a Souls-like is easy by any means, but some of the problems here—especially the cash shop stuff—feels so obviously at odds with everything that has made the Souls-like become such a popular style of game in the past decade.

There are these brief moments in Legend of Abyss where some of the heart, the love of the Souls source material, shone through the cracks just enough that I started to turn the corner and feel like I might really enjoy it. But unfortunately, not enough light could get in to bring life back to this musty, rundown castle.

SCORE: 2 STARS OUT OF 5

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