Summoners War: Lost Centuria Review

PvP Spinoff

Summoners War: Lost Centuria is a strategy game developed by Com2uS and is a spinoff of Summoners War. While both games have similar concepts with collecting monsters and using them in battle, Lost Centuria has a bigger focus on PvP battles rather than PvE. Luckily, the combat system is interesting and fun, so PvP suits this spinoff well.

Counterattack

Much of the game’s combat system is built around the mechanic of countering your opponent. Once an opponent activates an ability, you can activate your own ability, countering them. When you counter an opponent, your skill will be a bit stronger and will activate before theirs. This can be used with defensive abilities to completely block incoming attacks or offensive abilities to slay an enemy monster before it can act. My favorite way to counterattack is with the Damage Conversion spell. When I see a big attack incoming, I activate the spell and turn the damage into healing.

This can go both ways though. An enemy can counter any attack you make as well. While this makes the game interesting, it does make the start of a match awkward. Both you and your opponent are waiting to counter one another. To try avoiding this problem, I always keep one low-cost skill so I can throw it out early before the other player has enough energy to counter. Generally, whoever can get a rhythm of counters going tends to win the game. So, while the counter mechanic makes the game interesting, it can also heavily sway the battle in favor of one person. Sometimes it feels more like a waiting game than a match.

Another thing that makes winning feel a little random are buffs, debuffs and healing. There are a lot of characters that rely heavily on buffing and debuffing to win. For example, my healer, Soha, steals a buff from the enemy target and applies it to my whole team. This completely cripples teams that need to buff their units. So, if I happen to match with a team that needs to buff itself, I’ll have a much easier time winning. The reverse of this is also true though. If I’m using characters like Verdehile and spells like Chain of Despair, I can get completely countered by a healer that removes debuffs. There are a lot of counter picks like that.

Summoning and Enhancing

Lost Centuria does a good job of providing free materials and currency to players. There are daily quests that give a decent amount of both regular and premium crystals. Even after the initial starter boost, crystals still pour in frequently. You also get free summons when you win PvP matches by gathering glory. However, it can become difficult to level up your units. The number of materials it costs to level up has a steep incline. Levelling monsters will start to cost upwards of twenty copies of the same card. This can make upgrading rarer cards much more difficult.

Runes are also hard to get. The only way to get runes is by crafting them. You can only craft with bottles you receive on missions. When you send monsters out on missions, they’ll go exploring for a few hours before returning with rewards. But when crafting runes, you can’t choose what you’ll get. You get a random bunch of runes from a set of three. To make this worse, runes can only fit in one type of slot. There’s top pieces, bottom left pieces, and bottom right pieces. There are also different rarities of runes. You can generally make about ten or so a day with what the quests give you. So, if you want a good set of runes that all match so you can get a set bonus, you must grind for months.

Other Modes

Lost Centuria focuses on PvP in the arena, but there are a few other modes as well. There’s also single and challenge mode. Single mode is the PvE mode, and it is very short. You unlock more sections of PvE by reaching higher ranks in the PvP arena. Each section is only three fights long. You’ll battle an AI opponent and get rewarded with a new monster card at the end. There are bonus rewards you can get for clearing the areas with higher scores as well. There aren’t any real benefits to fighting enemies again after you already beat them though. This pretty much makes the PvE mode obsolete. It’s just a way to get cards. The combat is the exact same as the PvP mode as well. It’s just against an AI opponent instead of another player.

Challenge mode is like arena mode, but there are special modifiers given to each match. For example, fire units might become stronger every time an ally dies in battle. This effect applies to both you and your opponent. So, you could either stack your team with fire units to make use of the effect or bring lots of water units to counter all the fire units you’ll be fighting. This would be fun if the matchmaking in challenge mode wasn’t so weird. Usually in arena, you’d be matched with someone close to your rank. In challenge mode, the ranks are a bit more flexible. Oftentimes you’ll fight someone either way too high ranked or too low ranked. You’ll either steamroll the enemy or get crushed.