DC: Dark Legion (PC) Preview

I’m very careful (and picky) about the games I play with microtransactions. Some of them can be predatory, and others can be balanced in such a way that you don’t have to pay to be able to succeed. DC: Dark Legion can be a slog as a Free-to-Play player, but it does have some good sides to it. Here is the good, the bad, and the expensive.

To start, DC: Dark Legion is loosely based on a run of comics known as the Dark Multiverse Saga, which involves dark versions of DC heroes and a struggle between them and the heroes we know. You play as a faceless character given powers by The Monitor, who seeks to avert a dark fate that The Batman Who Laughs wants to create.

The Batman Who Laughs creates six “Crisis Towers,” which produce a corrupting miasma. At first, you only have a few heroes, but as you progress through the story (and various bits of side content), you’ll fight back and learn how to combat this miasma. To survive, the Batman from this universe (the non-evil one) gives you and your allies the use of a spare Batcave.

As you build the facilities for this Batcave, you’ll engage in base-building gameplay, which also allows you to build an ever-growing shelter for survivors that you rescue from the Dark Legion. Each facility is built in real time, though once you get the research lab, you can research things that will make further construction upgrades (and research) go faster.

At first, the upgrades don’t take very long. However, as you progress, the upgrades take longer and longer, which slows down your amount of play time. Of course, you can purchase one of many different premium currencies to speed up the progression and unlock more story levels, or you can earn the currency via quests and PVP.

What starts to get complicated (and will likely confuse some players) is that there are no fewer than six different currencies to progress. One involves crafting gear for your characters, one involves upgrading base facilities, one involves awakening characters to a new rank after every 10 levels, then there is XP to level those characters, plus you have a research currency, and then there are shards which allow you to upgrade your characters’ abilities and stats.

Warner Bros. and the developers of DC: Dark Legion have engineered things in such a way that progression slows down after a while. You stop gaining new upgrades at a steady rate, your characters stop being able to pass challenges, your story progress is locked, etc, etc. This is where the microtransactions come in. As you play, you’ll start getting pop-ups for microtransactions. They’ll be small at first, things like a starter pack, etc, etc. As you progress, you might be tempted to buy a few, “just to speed things up.” However, if you do that, you’re only increasing the problem.

I’ll come back to that in a minute. Let’s shift gears a little. The actual levels and challenges involve what I would call strategic auto-battler gameplay. The characters largely operate on their own. However, they all have one of six different classes which determines their role. As you rank up their star level, they unlock new abilities or increase their stats. This also allows you to unlock “Force Levels” as well, which take specific shards to increase stats or upgrade abilities.

Getting new characters can be done in one of two ways. You can open Mother-Boxes (often gained through quests, the in-game currency shop, or various challenges and levels. Alternatively, you can utilize “The Bleed,” which works as the Gacha system. Characters have different rarities, which determine their overall stats and capabilities. However, Bleed pulls also give you “Legacy Pieces”, which are special pieces of gear that represent different artifacts or elements in the DC universe.

The problem with this is that Legacy Pieces are extremely valuable, and The Bleed (Gacha) is the only place to get them. Bleed pulls are also harder to get without spending real money. This is the first “pay to win” element you’ll run into. As far as I can tell, though, certain character shards can only be gotten from The Bleed as well, so if you want (or need) a specific character, the Gacha system is practically required.

Now, I’ll be fair to Warner Bros. for a minute and play devil’s advocate. If you stick to your guns and choose not to spend any money, you will be able to progress. However, the amount of time you’ll put in to get there will likely drive you insane. As someone who loves the DC Universe and has gotten really fond of games like Honkai Star Rail (which has a much better monetization model), this grind makes DC: Dark Legion a bit disappointing.

When DC: Dark Legion is good, it is very good. The story is interesting, the music is good, the voice acting is great, and the combat is strategic and plays like a puzzle that keeps you figuring out new team compositions as you unlock new characters. It is these elements that will make you want to keep going when that wall hits, when you start having a hard time progressing.

Because DC: Dark Legion just came out in March, I think the developers have a bit of time to correct their course a bit. I understand these games are money farms, and I understand that microtransactions are just a part of the mobile gaming industry. However, I think that DC Comics fans and the people who were so excited for DC: Dark Legion should get something better than this.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is fun for a while. It even runs like a dream on PC, which I love. It is much more accessible to me (and a lot of people) on PC. However, I worry about the slippery slope of this monetization model. Sure, the “whales” (big spenders) are going to spend regardless, but if they make the game a bit more free-to-play friendly, even people on a fixed income might be willing to toss a few bucks around to support a good game.

If you get a good group of players together for a “league”, where you are helping each other and enjoying the game, that makes it more palatable. However, the push for Microtransactions still hangs heavily over the whole experience. A League will reduce the pay-to-win aspect, but it will still hang over the experience.

I like DC: Dark Legion, I do. However, I can’t in all honesty sit here and tell you the game doesn’t have flaws in its monetization or its setup. When it is good, it is very good, but the grind hits you like a truck when you progress too far.

A Starter Pack for DC: Dark Legion was provided by FunPlus for the purposes of this Preview.