iPad MMORPG! Pocket Legends

Imagine conquering castles from your iPhone. Or slaying demons from the comfort of your iPad. Thanks to Pocket Legends, a new massively multiplayer online game, you can draw swords with friends across a variety of platforms and connection types. So next time you want to slay the undead with your trusty battleaxe, you can do so anywhere and anytime.

On Thursday, Spacetime Studios announced Pocket Legends, a 3D MMO for the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. This cross-platform role playing game boasts the ability to play with your friends or make new ones online over wireless 3G, or Edge networks. The game is free to play with in-app purchases and is now available for download at the App Store.

Waiting for that World of Warcraft-style MMORPG to storm onto the App Store for some time now. This hope has finally become a reality with Pocket Legends, a cross-platform cooperative dungeon crawler where you match up randomly with up to four other players and slash through lands invaded by evil knights, zombies, and other creatures.

Pocket Legends isn’t an MMO in the traditional open-world sense. You navigate from dungeon to dungeon by means of a menu system. This is a fair compromise, although you need to click a lot of buttons to find what you like. There isn’t a good way to quickly find a group at your level, as everything is compiled into one place. We'd like to see the menus streamlined in a future update.

However, we aren’t here for the menus. It’s all about working with other players, or by yourself if you choose, to smash through a variety of levels referred to as "instances" in MMO parlance. There are a lot to run through, with 14 available at first and 18 more difficult levels available via map packs for $1.99 a pop. The downside is that most of them feel pretty similar and have the same kinds of enemies, just tougher and more plentiful.

Once you start, Pocket Legends is a lot of fun. There is something about charging enemies with your team of warriors controlled by real people that gives you a sense of excitement not found anywhere else in iPhone or iPad gaming.

Once you beat the initial levels and have some skills unlocked, there is a good amount of depth to the combat. A wide variety of moves can be deployed, like a ground stomp that sends your enemies falling onto their backs and “buffs” to temporarily increase your stats. You can also talk with the other players through the chat box and view a map of the dungeon.

Besides stat managing, which is fairly simple, there isn’t a whole lot of customization. Each of the three classes is paired to a specific character which has one player model. As you level up, you can get new gear, but your progression is very straightforward.

Once you finish all the dungeons and have your character at a high level, there isn’t much more to do. The lack of end game content that gives a continuous challenge means the only thing left to do is mindlessly run through familiar halls or try out a new character. Buying slots for this extra character costs $0.99 each.

If you choose, you can also buy the best armor with real-world money. This takes away a lot of the reward associated with attaining such weapons, but it's up to you if you want to take the shortcut.

Despite these flaws, Pocket Legends is a lot of fun. For free, you'll get a few hours of fresh content that works across both the iPhone and iPad. There is no discernible difference between the two versions of the game, either, except that on the iPad you can zoom the camera out further, and all of the menu items are neatly tucked away on the edges of the larger screen.

Since the apps are more like clients, the developer can release updates to your device any time. There is still a lot of work going into the game at the moment, as there seems to be new content every time we log in. Even if this isn’t usually your type of game, you should give Pocket Legends a try for free.