If you’ve been on the internet in the last couple of years, you’ve definitely heard of RAID: Shadow Legends. This turn-based fantasy RPG is all about building up a team of heroes to conquer tough dungeons and earn powerful rewards.

RAID: Shadow Legends has been promoted heavily. You might have seen famous Youtubers, streamers, or gaming personalities pushing the game. A lot of the time, these ads don’t do a good job of describing what the game is. They just use some jargon, talk about how great it is in a generic sense, and move on. 

The result is that a lot of people have played RAID: Shadow Legends looking for the wrong type of game. RAID: Shadow Legends is a turn-based gacha RPG with a big development budget. It’s got a fully voiced story, lots of super-detailed characters, and stunning 3D animations. This means that it looks, sounds, and plays like one of the best games in the genre.

So what does that mean? First of all, RAID: Shadow Legends is a turn-based gacha RPG. It’s mostly an autobattler, meaning that your teams will delve into dungeons and do battle without much help from you. All you have to do is sit back and watch them work. Your role in the game is more of a coach, manager, or boss. You’ll need to assign units to various teams, equip them with gear, and level them up to keep them at their best.

RAID: Shadow Legends is free to play. One of the biggest criticisms of the game is that it’s fairly pushy with its in-game microtransactions. If you’re careful and diligent, however, you can get pretty far in RAID: Shadow Legends while spending very little money. The key is to be patient, save resources for the right time, and to be sure to log in every day and get all of the free rewards that you can.

Like many other freemium games, RAID: Shadow Legends limits the amount of stuff you can do each day with a regenerating energy resource. This makes RAID: Shadow Legends perfect for people who don't have a lot of time to grind. You won’t fall behind, since your friends will be limited by the energy system as well and can’t spend hours getting more levels than you.

RAID: Shadow Legends has a few multiplayer elements, including clan bosses that you can fight together with your friends and an arena that you can use to rank yourself amongst RAID: Shadow Legends players. These systems have helped the player base band together and form communities. You can bring your friends with you to RAID: Shadow Legends, but you might be surprised to find how easy it is to make friends with your guild mates.

Characters in RAID: Shadow Legends are acquired via various shards. While it’s super expensive to get every character and level them up all the way, it’s quite reasonable to get many of your favorite characters on a modest budget. You’ll have to be patient and plan things out in order to achieve your goals, but it’ll feel even better when you pull it off.

The keys to RAID: Shadow Legends are patience and persistence. Logging on each day, doing some content, and then logging off will allow you to accumulate quite a few resources over time. If you spend these resources on a whim, however, you’ll be back to square one. Take some time and research where you can spend each type of shard before you start summoning like crazy.

One of the first things you should do in RAID is familiarize yourself with the roster and find some units you think are neat. These don’t need to be super powerful or effective characters, but they should be characters that you like the look of or that you think sound fun. From there, figure out how you acquire these characters. Will you need to save up a lot of a specific type of shard and wait for them to appear, or can you get them via another method?

Early on, you’ll probably want to focus on your first character and level them as much as you can. This means leveling up your starter gear, getting them to 60, and devoting most of your resources to them. Even if they’re not the best late-game carry, you’ll be able to progress through a lot of the game’s early content with a modest investment, enabling you to earn lots of resources.

Are you a RAID: Shadow Legends fan? What are your teams? Who are the best characters in the game right now? Let us know in the comments below!