Be A Legend: Football really challenges you to become a super football (as in “soccer” for our over-the-pond readers) player and in order to get there, you have the chance to control his career, training, bits of personal life and performance during the game. And since similar game modes in the FIFA or PES series have been extremely successful, we can see a lot of attraction here!
In terms of gameplay, Be A Legend: Football is divided into two parts: first, you have the “play football matches” element in which you control your player directly and then there’s a sort of a time management, mostly text-based RPG element where you complete missions by spending energy points, you upgrade your skills after performing jobs and you even create your own equipment from “loot” gathered during these missions.
Somehow, From the Bench managed to make both elements extremely enjoyable and the best thing is that each one complements the other extremely well. You can first play the matches first and then focus on the RPG element, since the energy requirement for one is not shared with the other. Pretty smart and interesting!
When you’re on the football court in Be A Legend: Football, you don’t actually get to play the whole game. Instead, the match engine runs the game in the background and when there’s an important moment featuring your own player, it stops the play and lets you make the choice.
This goes like this: a situation is described and you have two options to resolve it. Each action requires the use of one of your skills (or a combination of them) and its success is based on the value of that given skill – if it is higher than that of the opponent, you will succeed and if it’s lower, you will fail it. It’s pretty interesting at first but after playing more than a dozen of matches, you will realize that they’re actually pretty repetitive and this is really something I hope the developers will fix in future updates.
There’s also one other thing: when creating my player, I decided to go (like most of the players probably do) with a dangerous striker and when improving my skills I focused on the shooting and dribbling, which I consider natural and key requirements for a striker. However, during the games I will often find my striker in defensive positions, being the last man in line and having to do that sliding tackle to save the day. Which in my case rarely happens because, as I said, I focused more on the attack skills. So this is not extremely realistic, but adds some extra challenge into play and a bit of variety.
When you’re not on the football pitch testing your skills against other players – because you can indeed challenge other real opponents – you will be at “home” performing jobs that reward you with money, experience and materials, as well as worldwide glory. The money can be spend of fixing your equipment, buying new one or buying property for your player, like housing and cars which will actually improve your skills. The materials also add a new element to the game, allowing you to use them to create super equipment for your player.
The freemium element is not too annoying – or at least I haven’t reached that point yet. You can purchase special equipment or items for real money and you do need some premium currency to play the league games, but until now I didn’t really feel the need, nor had the impression that the developers try to force me t to spend real money on their game. I am curious what happens when I finish my league game tokens, but there’s a long way until there!
All in all, Be a Legend: Football is a pretty charming game and a rather unique experience available for free in the Google Play store. I had a lot of time playing the game and I will definitely keep playing until I bring my Torquay U team the glory they deserve. Until then, you should definitely try playing this game – it does have its lows like all games do, but no real deal breakers if you are to ask me.
Final rating: 3.5 out of 5
