My brain works in weird ways. I woke up this morning remembering this gem.
It's a free to play game released by 5th planet games, and I played it on Kongregate way back in the day. 5PG shut down the servers back in 2012 or 2013, and I remember feeling...cold...when it happened. I think that's the right word to describe it.
The game was all about super heroes. You'd create your own hero, build a deck of allies to help you and super powers to use in game, and...that was the schtick for this game. It was a simple idea, and they drew from years of comic book history to shape the design of the game. What impressed me the most about LoH was the original universe that 5PG created. It felt familiar, like you had grown up reading the comics.
The story mode was broken up into chapters, which were depicted as issues of the Legacy of Heroes comic book. And the story shared was fun! You're a student at a school for super heroes, a school very similar to a certain Marvel school for gifted children. The lead instructor is Professor Helios, a fire manipulator who strikes me as eerily similar to Dumbledore the more I think about him. While I don't remember much about the actual story, I remember the school coming under attack by a bunch of Villains, Helios getting stomped (and maybe dying? I can't remember), and facing off against a league of villains along the way. With the rise of Boku no Hero Academia, I'm a trifle surprised we haven't seen a resurgence of this game. There's a whole lot of parallels!
The raids were pretty famous on this game. You'd get a handful of people together, and take on a supervillain together. one of the most famous (and more memorable) raids was against Dimetrodon. I looked online today, wondering what happened to this game, and stumbled upon a forum thread of other people asking if they remember LoH. The first response? A line from the Dimetrodon raid: "DIMETRODON FIGHT!!!" If that's not an indicator of how memorable the raids were, I don't know what is!
The raids gave you equipment, special cards, and I thought one of the higher level raids gave currency for a special shop. They were a nice buff to your decks, especially when you needed that little boost to get to the next chapter.
For as detailed the game was, It was a real shame that the game shut down. I remember logging in for my daily login bonus, and seeing that I got a bunch of premium currency. And a large amount! And then the chat showed up on the side. The chat was already mourning a game that was set to shut down in a month. It sucked, but there we were. Legacy of Heroes had entered its death knell, shut down by the developers. I guess they weren't making money on it, so they couldn't afford the servers. And I...I couldn't stick around. That was the end of the game for me.
Every now and again, my ADHD addled brain remembers Legacy of Heroes. It remembers the artwork, the design aesthetic, and the DIMETRODON FIGHT!!! Unfortunately, that's all it's gonna be now. Memories of a time lost to the aether.
