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Spirit Lords

Spirit Lords is a free-to-play, fantasy MMORPG on mobile devices with cartoony graphics, a persistent map with instanced dungeons, 4-player real-time co-op, tap-based action combat, a unique Element and Spirit system, over a thousand different weapons and armor, and an interesting story with lots of cutscenes and dialogue.

Publisher: Kabam
Type: Mobile MMORPG
Release Date: April 9, 2015
Shut Down: July 08, 2016
PvP: None
Pros: +Action combat. +Great graphics. +Unique element and spirit system. +Engaging story.
Cons: -Energy system. -Grindy gameplay. -Party system could use improvements.

Spirit Lords Shut Down on July 08, 2016

Overview

Spirit Lords Overview

Spirit Lords is a 3D action, dungeon crawler MMORPG published by Kabam, a leading free-to-play mobile gaming company. Spirit Lords was developed by an all-star team comprised of designers that worked on games such as Diablo 1 & 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the popular cartoon, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Fight through instanced dungeons with tap-based, action combat reminiscent of the Diablo series. Activate special abilities with touch and gesture controls designed for mobile devices. Play as a Barbarian or Sorcerer and customize your hero with various appearance options. Collect over a thousand different pieces of equipment. Discover hundreds of different Spirits that can be upgraded and evolved. Each Spirit has a unique ability and element to give your hero different playstyles in battle. Experience top notch graphics and artwork and a story filled with mystery and humor. Team up with friends or strangers in real-time 4 player co-op. Conquer dungeons and become the world’s greatest Spirit Lord.

Spirit Lords Key Features:

  • Persistent world with instanced dungeons.
  • Tap-based gameplay with touch and gesture controls that provide intuitive action combat.
  • Two classes (Barbarian and Sorcerer).
  • Unique Element and Spirit skill system.
  • Over 100 Spirits to collect and over 1,000 pieces of equipment to discover.
  • 4-player real-time online co-op party system.
  • Engaging story with humorous dialogue and many cutscenes.

Spirit Lords Screenshots

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Spirit Lords Featured Video

Spirit Lords - Official Launch Trailer

Full Review

Spirit Lords Review

By, Herman Y.

Spirit Lords is a free-to-play, 3D dungeon crawler MMORPG developed and published by Kabam. Spirit Lords was developed by an all-star team of designers including Phil Shenk, the art director of Diablo 1 & 2, Daniel Erickson, the creative and design lead of Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins, and Danny Keller, the animation director behind Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Spirit Lords was designed to bring a high quality and deep RPG experience to mobile devices with an all-star team that has worked for high-end companies such as Bioware and Blizzard. Spirit Lords launched worldwide on Android and iOS on April 9, 2015 and acquired over 100,000 downloads within 2 months. With the goal of delivering a game-changing RPG to mobile devices, did Kabam meet their expectations or did they fall short of their goal?

Character Creation: Brute Strength or Magical Force?

Spirit Lords begins with character creation. Players can choose between one of two classes: the vicious Barbarian or the cunning Sorcerer. Armed with heavy, two-handed weapons, Barbarians rely on brute strength and high defenses and have abilities such as leaping long distances, AOE slams, throwing weapons, enchanting their weapons with fire, and more. Barbarians can also infuse themselves with different elements and Spirits which offer a wide variety of different skills. Sorcerers are long-ranged attackers that rely on powerful elemental spells and a distance from their enemies. Unlike Barbarians, Sorcerers wear light, cloth armor and must position themselves tactically in order to survive, but are able to decimate their foes quickly. They have abilities to teleport, conjure magical shields, cast powerful AOE spells, shoot bolts of magic, and much more. Sorcerers can also use Spirits to customize their elemental spells and abilities. In addition to choosing a class, players can also choose a gender and customize their appearance with a handful of head, hair, hair color, and clothing color options. Unlike most MMORPGs, this game only has two classes to choose from at the moment.

The World of Spirit Lords

Spirit Lords has a colorful and cartoony world filled with magic and fantasy elements. The game is a dungeon crawler, so there is a persistent map area where you can see other players and the dungeons are instanced. The map area contains a bunch of different locations, such as camps and crypts and later, Spirit Realms, for players to discover, and each location contains Story Dungeons, Side Dungeons, and Event Dungeons. The Story Dungeons progress the story, the Side Dungeons provide level experience and useful loot, and the Event Dungeons are only open during certain events. Each dungeon has a fairly different level design and each location greatly varies in theme, environments, and enemies. The graphics look quite good and the game has a slightly cartoony appearance to it. The environments are detailed and atmospheric, the effects are bright and flashy, and the character and armor designs are well crafted. Overall, Kabam’s team of top designers did a fine job in graphical designs, level designs, and animations.

Spirits and Relics

The most unique feature of Spirit Lords is its Spirit/Relic system. Players take the role as a Spirit Lord and can fuse with Spirits to use their power. Each character has 5 ability slots and a Spirit can be placed in each slot, which gives different skills and elements depending on the Spirit. Relics are urns that contain spirits. They are essentially Spirit boxes and opening them gives random Spirits. Each Spirit has a different element (Fire, Water, Grass, Arcane, and Void) which plays a huge role in combat. Water is stronger than Fire, which is stronger than Grass, which is stronger than Water. Arcane and Void are strong against each other. In order to have an advantage in battle, players need to equip Spirits of a stronger element than that of the monsters; therefore it is important to have Spirits of every element. Spirits also come with different abilities and equipping a certain Spirit will give your character that Spirit’s ability. It is a really neat system and the Spirit system adds a lot of variety and a collecting aspect to the game. Spirits can also be upgraded by sacrificing other Spirits and Evolved by combining Spirits with specific Spirits in their Evolution recipe.

Combat and Partying

The combat and controls in Spirit Lords are tap and gesture-based. Unlike most mobile action RPGs with joystick and button controls, players in Spirit Lords move by tapping the ground and attack enemies by tapping on them. There are also some skills that require holding the screen down or dragging the screen. The controls have a very point-and-click feel to it but is more similar to Diablo than traditional point-and-click MMORPGs. Enemies die fairly quickly and players will encounter multiple enemies at once which makes the game feel more action-oriented. The controls work well although I would personally have preferred joystick and button controls. Each dungeon is fairly large with many mobs of monsters to go through before reaching the boss or the end of the dungeon. Each dungeon also has a certain difficulty and a specific element-theme (i.e. all fire monsters or all water monsters, etc.). In order to survive higher level dungeons, players will usually have to grind Side Dungeons and acquire Spirits of the right elements in order to give themselves an advantage. Like most other MMORPGs, Spirit Lords has its fair share of grinding and farming that can lead to repetitive gameplay.

Each dungeon is instanced with a co-op party system for up to 4 players. Upon selecting a dungeon, players have an option to invite up to 3 nearby players to join their party. Players will have to wait for invited members to accept and ready before they can begin the dungeon. The party invite system is simple but could use some improvements. A room system in which players can host rooms for others to join or an automated party match-making system would be much better in my opinion. With the current system, most invited players either don’t join or are AFK. Partying itself, however, works well in dungeons and is completely in real-time so players can see and fight alongside other players. The party system adds fun, cooperative gameplay to the game but ultimately, the game could use a better party match-making system.

An Engaging Story

Most MMORPGs have fairly generic and lackluster stories but Spirit Lords manages to break the mold by providing a more engaging and captivating story experience. The game begins with a good amount of conversational dialogue between the player and his/her Spirit companion and the entire game is generally filled with dialogue and cutscenes. There is a main town with many NPCs to interact with, as well as a Spirit companion, Pix, who talks with the player at the beginning and end of each Story Dungeon. Animations such as body movement and facial expressions add to the immersion and the story is well-written. Evil forces are on a hunt for relics to increase their power and the main character, as a Spirit Lord, must stop them and use the power of the relics for himself. The story is broken up into Story Dungeons and completing each Story Dungeon will progress the story.

Gear up with Lots of Equipment

Spirit Lords provides a bountiful of equipment for players to collect to aid them in their battles. Players can wear five pieces of equipment including helmets, upper armor, bottom armor, gloves, and weapons. There are thousands of different weapons and armor to collect with different rarities and properties. Players can find new equipment mainly from completing dungeons and each dungeon can give various types of equipment. Each piece of weapon and armor provides a different appearance which gives players a unique look, and equipment affects the player’s Meta Power, which determines the difficulty of dungeons. It is fairly easy to find new equipment (each dungeon usually gives 2-5 pieces) and the game also has an easy, stream-lined way of selling equipment directly from the inventory to clear up space quickly. Unlike Spirits, however, equipment cannot be upgraded or enhanced in any way.

Cash Shop/In-App Purchases (IAP)

In-App Purchases are optional in Spirits Lords but can give big advantages. Money can be used to buy Moonstones (the premium currency), which in turn, can be used to purchase Elemental Shards, Spirit slot expansions, Rare Relic Draws, and can be used to revive in dungeons and refill Energy. Elemental Shards can also be obtained from missions and are used to unlock higher level dungeons and Nodes in the Spirit Realm. Spirit slot expansions allow players to have more inventory space for Spirits which is useful for collecting multiple Spirits of different elements. Rare Relic Draws give players a random Spirit between 3-5 stars in rank and can be used to obtain powerful spirits. Lastly, Moonstones can be used to revive in dungeons, which can save a lot of time if players die toward the end of the dungeon, and purchase energy to play longer since each dungeon takes up a good amount energy that slowly refills. None of these In-App Purchases are necessary to progress in the game but can really help in reducing time spent grinding and farming and can give players more powerful Spirits. Moonstones and tickets for free Relic Draws can be obtained every now and then for free from events, missions, and login rewards.

Final Verdict – Great

Developed by an all-star team of designers, Spirit Lords is a relatively good MMORPG with many unique features. Although the game has some flaws such as the Energy system, repetitive grinding and farming, and an inefficient party match-making system, it shines with its remarkable Spirit and Element system, pretty graphics, and engaging story. Overall, Spirit Lords is a unique and high quality game that all MMORPG fans should try out.

Screenshots

Spirit Lords Screenshots

Videos

Spirit Lords Videos

Playlist: Spirit Lords (Mobile)

System Requirements

Spirit Lords System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Newer Android builds / iOS 7 or later

Music

Spirit Lords Music & Soundtrack

Coming Soon...

Additional Information

Spirit Lords Additional Information

Developer: Kabam
Publisher: Kabam

Platforms: Android, iOS
Release Date: April 9, 2015

Shut Down: July 08, 2016

Spirit Lords was developed and published by Kabam, a leading free-to-play mobile game company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Partnered with famous brands such as Disney, Marvel, and Warner Bros, Kabam set a new focus in 2014 to bring AAA freemium console-quality games onto mobile devices after working on primarily strategy web-based games in previous years. Spirit Lords was created by a team consisting of Phil Shenk, Daniel Erickson, and Danny Keller, all of which have worked on high quality titles such as Diablo 1 & 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars for companies such as Blizzard, Bioware, and DreamWorks Interactive. Their goal was to create a free-to-play console-quality mobile game which ultimately became Spirit Lords. Spirit Lords was released worldwide on April 9, 2015, and reached over 100,000 downloads within the first two months.