Iron Maiden - Legacy of the Beast Review

Full disclosure here: I’m a bit obsessed with Iron Maiden. I’ve seen them live more times than any other band; twice on the same tour at one point. I grew up listening to them, their beer is my favourite, and I even bought all of Bruce Dickinson’s somewhat questionable solo albums. So it stands to reason that I’m not coming into this review as an impartial observer, but someone who’s already a teensy bit obsessed with the band. Nonetheless, I’ll be as impartial as a man with multiple Iron Maiden tattoos can be about a game starring the pioneers of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

Legacy of the Beast is the second game to come out featuring the band’s mascot Eddie, however the less said about 1999’s Ed Hunter, the better. If you’re not familiar with Eddie, he’s a zombie character who has adorned the band’s many album covers. Created by artist Derek Riggs, who created most of the band’s iconic covers, Eddie is a man (or more accurately beast) of many faces. He’s been a pharaoh, a skinless, time-travelling cyborg, a leather clad biker zombie and one of the horsemen of the apocalypse in his time. Those are just a few of the guises he’s taken; there are literally hundreds of versions of Eddie spread over albums, singles, tour posters and other promotional material, meaning there’s a huge amount of existing artwork to draw from.

50CC Games have used this shapeshifting ability of the group’s mascot to their advantage, putting him in an RPG that travels through time and space, incorporating the various different versions across the different locations. The story goes that Eddie’s soul has been shattered and you must help him recover the shards which are scattered throughout the world, both forward and back in time.

First thing you notice when loading up the game is that this is a very slickly done game for a mobile title. There’s a parallax effect on the home screen where the background moves around as you move your phone, leaving the foreground stationary. It’s only a little thing, but it’s indicative of the attention to detail that has gone into the title.

It opens with the familiar riff of The Evil That Men Do, which in turn merges into a slightly sped up rendition of 2 Minutes to Midnight, and in turn cycles through a number of other famous Maiden riffs and solos. To a seasoned fan of the band, it will be obvious that, whilst these aren’t the original studio recordings, they are still genuine recordings by the band. In fact, the music is taken from unreleased live recordings, mixed to fit the theme of the game. Most of the vocals are gone, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as the music is there to complement the storyline, rather than distract from it.

That’s not to say that the story is brilliant. It’s a good concept, but it’s told through a few snippets of conversation, with dialogue quite minimal. I’d really have liked some more in-depth cut scenes or suchlike here. It does the job, but it doesn’t get you invested in the fates of the characters like a great RPG story does.

The bulk of the game takes the form of traditional JRPG style turn based battles. These generally have objectives such as finishing above a certain health level or finishing in so many rounds. Completing these increases your “Skull” rating, which is just an alternative way of having one, two and three stars like most mobile games now do. The higher your skull rating, the better the loot that drops. In addition, there’s a hidden area in every world that is only unlocked when you’ve completed the objectives with the required three skull rating.

The battles are enjoyable and easily make up for the lack of story, getting you into the meat and bones of pummelling demons quickly. There’s also quite an in depth levelling system. Your characters can level up, but also evolve through a star rating system using items you find in battle. Along the way, you’ll find Souls which can be exchanged for new party members to join you, and talismans which can be used to give bonus stats and abilities to your characters. It’s not entirely unlike Final Fantasy VII’s Materia system or World of Warcraft’s armour system.

You’ll unlock different versions of Eddie from different record covers as you go, each with different abilities, allowing you to switch in battle to gain powers more suited to your current foes. With different characters being aligned to different elements, there’s a Pokémon style need to juggle your party around for the more complex fights.

The thing that I found most pleasing was the fact that the freemium aspect of the game is quite light. I’ve played through the first three worlds now on easy and hard modes, and I haven’t felt the need to spend any in game currency on everything. If you wanted an extended play session, you might find yourself running low on “sands of time” and needing to pay or wait to play more, but with sessions of about an hour in length at a time, I never found myself running out. If you want to beat the game on the harder modes quicker, then you can purchase upgrades, but unlike some free titles, I never felt that I had to pay in order to progress, in fact it’s quite the opposite; the game is a touch on the easy side until you’ve completed an area on normal and can up the difficulty to “hard” or “madness” Yes, you can indeed play with madness.

Little touches like that mentioned above make a big difference to the game. There are so many Maiden references, from the loading screens, to the difficulty levels, right through to the fact that a perfect hit at certain levels does precisely 666 damage. There’s a lot of fan service to be found here.

Overall, fans of Iron Maiden will probably love this game. if you’re not a fan of the band, it’s still a fun little bitesize RPG, which is ideal for the short-session nature of mobile gaming. You might not get all the references, but that’s unlikely to make the experience any less enjoyable.