Power Rangers Legacy Wars Review

The only thing hyped as much as the Power Rangers Movie in the last two weeks was the upcoming mobile fighting game from nWay titled “Power Rangers Legacy Wars“, where you create a team of your favorite (available) Power Rangers and fight against other teams in order to stop Rita Repulsa from conquering the Power Rangers multiverse.

We’ve played the game in-depth since release and we’d like to share our review of the game with you. The game is a free purchase in the app store with plenty of in-game purchases available to keep your team going strong. Click the “Read More” link to see our full review of the game and whether or not it’s worth your time!

The game begins with a pretty slick looking opening sequence explaining why in the world the Power Rangers are going to be fighting each other. From there, you go in to training where you learn how to play the game. The actual game itself is nothing more than a timed rock/paper/scissors game (like any other “fighting” game you’ll find out in the wild) but it manages to keep itself fresh and interesting because of the fact the moves are Power Rangers related both in the actual move and the name that they give it.

Your moves are broken down in to three categories – Block, Strike, and Breaker. Pretty simple rock/paper/scissor here with Block beating Strike, Strike beating Breaker, and Breaker beating Block. On top of that, your characters are broken in to three different types of fighters – Balanced, Attacker, and Defender. Obviously depending on your type of fighter will determine how often your moves come up in battle (ie: a Defender will get more opportunities to Block than an Attacker will).

You’re given a “Leader” type character and the ability to assign two characters to be “Assist” characters, who have the potential to show up as a “move” in your fight that allows you to summon them to do their special attack. Their special attack will either be a “Strike” or “Breaker” move, and your opponent (if they’re familiar with the character’s attack) has the opportunity to counter it if they’re quick enough.

The game then breaks down your actual character growth in to two different types of leveling systems – your Medals count (which determines what “League” you’re in and what characters you have access to), as well as an actual Level system where you level up based on your experience points that you gain from, say, opening your Morph Boxes and Donating your hard-earned shards to your Alliance friends.

The game also features two forms of currencies – Power Coins and Power Crystals. The Power Coins work towards leveling up your fighters (both the “Leader” and the “Assist”) while the Power Crystals work towards opening up the “Morph Boxes” that you get as rewards from fights. As you progress further, you’ll also receive orbs from Eltar which allow you to level up your character’s individual moves to cause more damage.

Finally – at League 2 you can join Alliances. These don’t quite have a real purpose in the game other than to hang out with your friends in a group chat and to donate character tokens to each other to help level up the characters. Doing so rewards you with gold and experience. Hopefully in the future you will be able to use Alliances as some sort of tournament bracket system – but again, we’re only a few days in to the game’s release.

It’s at this point the game begins to break down a bit from “This is the best Power Rangers game ever!” to “Ohhhh…okay, here we go”. You want Medals. Those are super important because you can’t unlock certain characters unless you’re in a certain league, which is only available based upon your Medal count. Example – League III requires 1000 medals, and League IV requires 1700 medals. You gain medals by winning fights. How hard can that be? Well, you LOSE medals if you lose fights. And, the higher you gain in medals/level, the stranger the game’s “random” matching system works. As you can see in my screen shots, I’m a high League III and Level 3 fighter. Before taking those pictures I played for about 20 minutes and had four matches. In 3 of those 4 matches, I fought people with over 2,000 medals who were level 4 or 5 – basically a guaranteed loss for the most part (if they’re leveling up their character’s abilities to do, say, half my health in damage). I lost one fight in 3 hits (an estimated 1386 damage in 3 hits).

Psycho Red…! If you want him, you’ll have to get to League V. To do that, level up your character by winning! How do you that? By having stronger characters. How do you do that? Purchase Power Crystals to unlock high level Morph Boxes so you can keep up! Yeaaahh!!!

So how do you beat that? Well you can get stronger characters by opening up Morph Boxes. Sadly, the lowest tier Morph Box takes 2 hours to “unlock” … unless you want to unlock it now spending some Power Crystals. The downside is you drop anywhere from 8 to 48 Power Crystals to unlock different tier boxes and the rewards don’t quite match what you’d hope for … you get (on higher tier Morph Boxes) maybe 35 coins, 17 crystals, and more points to level up your characters, and MAYBE that Legendary rare that you’ve been hoping for.

I bit the bullet and paid a decent amount of spare (don’t tell my better half) change to see exactly how hard it would be to get the Super Megaforce Yellow Ranger, a Legendary rare. Let’s just say I purchased 4 of the highest tier Morph Boxes (1800 Power Crystals) and was only able to “partially” unlock her.

In short – the game has a pay wall and you’ll experience it around League III play. If you decided to buy the Mighty Morphin Green Ranger pack on day one, you already know that the Green Ranger is over-powered at low levels and helps you breeze through the competition in no time. That’s the scheme of “Pay to Win”, and Power Rangers Legacy Wars suffers from that same gaffe the further you play. Unless you want to wait upwards of 8 hours to unlock 4 low tier Morph Boxes so you can level up your Common character from Level 3 to Level 4 so they can still be easily countered by your opponent who has that Epic rare assist character that you REALLY want.

The game also suffers from some server issues and some possible hacks. Many times I will beat my opponent only for the match to end in a draw. I’ve also had matches where I’m unable to fire off a single attack because my opponent is just too fast and is countering my every move prior to me being able to finish executing it (ie: I summon my assist, but before my assist even enters the fight they’ve run to the other side of the screen, run back, and summoned their assist … while mine is STILL coming in to play). Yet, fighting that same character later and I wipe the floor with them.

All in all – Power Rangers Legacy Wars is a beautiful, fun game that will entertain you for hours and if you’re a fan of Power Rangers you will enjoy it. However, much like every other mobile game in the history of forever, if you want to be the BEST or have the BEST stuff, get the cash ready because eventually you’re going to have to “Pay to Win”, or sadly, “Pay to Keep Up”.