Raid Shadow Legends vs Eternal Evolution – How do they compare?

Having spent the last 6 weeks or so playing Eternal Evolution, including various patches during that time, it’s time for an honest review and comparison to Raid: Shadow Legends, which is of course our primary game and what our business is based on.

Raid for the longest period of time has had little to no competition in the genre and no game that has come to light has stuck around or even really begun to look like it could compete with Raid, either due to ludicrous paywalls, or lack of development.

Hellhades has done a deep dive on this, comparing the two games in many different areas, and rating the games out of 5 to find a final score.

This is not an attempt of saying “Eternal Evolution is a better game” or “Raid is dying”, but more of an attempt to make Plarium realize that they do need to be aware of their competition.

When it comes to income, Raid is by far still the top dog and has a much larger player base with around 50mil installs, and this has been the case for a very long time, however, Eternal Evolution only released on a global scale just over a month ago, and are nearing the top 10 for the genre, which features many big names, so they’re definitely doing a great job thus far.

Visuals:

Raid is renowned for its visuals, they are at the top of the market for their visuals and always have been, everywhere you go in the game there are incredible views everywhere, including a Bastion that feels alive and changes with the seasons.

All Raid Champions look immense, and are made using 3D Polygon acted recording to build the skills and animations of their Champions.

Eternal Evolution is a massive step in the right direction when it comes to competing with Raid on visuals, granted they are not there yet, nothing is quite as crisp but it is a very aesthetically pleasing game, with a different style, but great attention to detail on their Champions.

It’s easily the closest we’ve seen to a game that can be compared to Raid Shadow Legends in terms of visuals.

The games do also have different battle styles, so whilst Raid is a crisper view, the interaction between Characters in Eternal Evolution may be preferential to some.

Champions:

Raid is incredibly diverse with 700+ Champions with unique skills, and interactions in different areas of content giving you tons of options when it comes to building teams for all different parts of the game.

Raid frequently adds new Champions, in big batches, and as more are added, it does mean that it gets harder and harder to get these specific Champions, which is increasingly negative for new players looking to get very important Epic Champions.

Eternal Evolution only came out officially just over a month ago, and has around 60 Heroes, with different skill sets, falling into Categories called Classes, such as Tank, Summoners, Supports, Hunters, and Assassins, each filling a different role that you may find essential to building teams.

Eternal Evolution so far has been releasing a new Hero every 2 weeks or so, and when doing so, releases a new Limited Banner for them, allowing you to collect the new hero.

Ways to get Best Champions:

This is an area where Raid struggles for sure, whilst there are ways of picking up new Champions from Fusions, Guaranteed Events, and such, the Champion pool is just SO large that it makes it incredibly unlikely to get specific Champions that you are after, and that only gets worse and harder as time goes by, with the addition of more new Champions.

Guaranteed Champion Events are few and far between and require serious self-control to save your shards enough to be able to collect them each time they are available, and that number of shards required appears to be going up and up with the most recent event being 110 Void Shards over the previous 70.

Eternal Evolution as we mentioned above, holds events for Limited Tickets, where after 60 Tickets you are GUARANTEED to get the active event Champion, there is nearly always 1-2 of these Events running at any given time, and they always release them with a brand new Champion too, so you don’t have to wait around hoping to pick up a new Hero.

Granted, you do need multiple copies to evolve these Champions enough to be viable, but this can either be done with multiple copies of the hero OR with Gene Hybrid orbs which act as a copy of any hero in the game.

Gene Hybrids are available in the ticket shop with any active summon event, and through other events in the game, allowing you to pick up a few a month to help evolve your heroes further.

Finally, there are rewards in Events where you are able to pick up SSS Heroes periodically.

As you can see, there are tons of ways of actually acquiring SSS Heroes, however – the development needed for them to become relevant takes time, which counters the ease of acquiring an initial copy.

Gear:

Raid has a TON of different gear sets, providing benefits whether that be a chance to place debuffs, negate damage, deal more damage, or just outright provide stats, which gives a TON of diversity when it comes to building your Champions.

Eternal Evolution has way fewer sets, which makes gearing much easier, especially for new players with less to worry about whilst developing knowledge on the game, most of the gear sets are stat based, with a few special 4-piece sets available from the Ancient Altar.

Both games have a range of Primary Stats on their equipment, and each of those can then gain a variety of Substats, so finding a perfect item will take a while and some luck.

Build Diversity:

Both games do things very differently when it comes to diversity, whilst Raid has Masteries that can completely change the style of how a Champion plays out, depending on how you build it, on top of the mass amount of gear sets.

Eternal Evolution has Exclusives that further empower your heroes, however, this rarely affects the way that a hero is built, but in some cases it does, the main diversity comes from Prototypes and Commanders, as they will provide additional effects to your whole team, or some of your team, based on Classes, and make your skills interact differently, some of these have insane synergy such as the Gautier Commander, alongside Pain Rune as a Prototype, will grant Assassin and Vanguard Heroes the potential of huge AOE damage and AOE Stuns to control enemies.

Dungeons:

Both games have a good range of Dungeons, of course, Raid being an older game has a lot more Dungeons available, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, as the addition of the two newest dungeons hasn’t been the best received, as both Iron Twins and Sand Devils are both VERY end-game orientated, with minimal rewards for a ton of effort.

Eternal Evolution has 3 different Dungeons, 1 for gear, 1 for Commanders, and 1 for Prototypes, making it nice and clear where you should be farming and not overcomplicating things. The Dungeons are also very well made, just like Raids.

Player Impact:

By Player Impact, we’re talking about how much influence a player can have on a fight, for example in Raid, if you’re struggling to beat a stage, you can completely take over and manually work your way through the fight, whilst Eternal Evolution has a similar situation, it only revolves around manual use of the Ultimate Skills, which definitely reduces the impact, but also makes the game very player friendly.

Eternal Evolutions PVP is all auto, whereas in Raid you can manually control your team, making it more about strategy and opening up a bigger competitive edge.

Daily Boss:

Raid’s Clan Boss is arguably the best feature in the entire game, with so many options for what you can use, and it gives you some incredible rewards on a daily basis. The only negative with Clan Boss is simply the time it takes, many runs can go on for upwards of 30 minutes, 4 times a day.

Eternal Evolution clearly looked at the time spent in Clan Boss and decided that wasn’t for them – as they have a very different system.

There are two different Guild Bosses in Eternal Evolution, the Daily Challenge which you can quite literally skip through once you’ve got a team, and pick up your rewards in a matter of seconds, and the Guild Hunt which is a new feature that so far is INCREDIBLE.

Guild Hunt consists of three different boss types which as a guild you progress through, whilst this technically isn’t daily, it is active for 4 days of the week, and will require coordination within your guild to push to your furthest potential, with each boss rewarding you for building specific teams.

Great Hall System:

Raids Great Hall System provides a great boost, and an important boost throughout the game, however, it does rely on your participation in Arena, however, the boosts are incredibly vital to PVE content, which is not ideal as you are relying on PVP Progression to aid your PVE Progression, which typically is quite backward.

As for Eternal Evolution, you are rewarded for PVE Content with a Great Hall, from the Guild Hunt, allowing you to progress your Guild Technology and enhance your stats significantly!

The boosts from Guild Tech are absolutely massive and something you should not be ignored by any stretch.

Weekly Boss:

Raid’s weekly boss is Hydra Clan Boss, which is great, but for most players in the game it’s unreachable, or at the very best they are able to scrape through Normal Clan Boss.

The rewards for Hydra are mediocre, with it mostly being Soulstones and Hydra Specific Gear, and would be significantly better if they included books and shards.

Eternal Evolution has Eternal Altar, which is amazing as there is a difficulty that nearly anybody can do, you’ll be clearing the top level of Novice within your first week of the game, and eventually progressing all the way to Hell for some insane weekly rewards, including Limited Tickets, which are the main summoning currency in Eternal Evolution, as well as lots of the 4-piece set gear.

The best time to do Altar every week is on Sunday, as your progress throughout the week can all work towards being able to achieve a higher level in your weekly Altar Chests.

Rewards:

Raid is rather unrewarding, from Events specifically, the rewards are more often than not completely awful, and in the event that some good rewards are available, they are usually at very high point requirements making it very unfriendly towards free-to-play players.

Eternal Evolution has a large number of rewards available such as Limited Tickets, Advanced Tickets, and Gems for completing levels, with faster times giving you better rewards, which makes tons of rewards accessible for new players in the early parts of progression, this is great as it helps you boost your account and continue to progress through the content.

Market/Shops:

Raids shops and markets really need work, there are so many of them at this point, with the Bazaar, Guild shop, Market, and Soul Market, but the rewards are mediocre and at high price points, apart from the one-time purchases of things like Drexthar Bloodtwin, they really aren’t great and haven’t been updated in a very long time.

Eternal Evolution has several very up-to-date shops in the game, all of which provide you with relevant and important items, whether that be gear, summons, gear and resources to level that gear, and many more things.

The shops are a big part of Eternal Evolution, and you should make sure to take advantage of these on a daily basis.

PVP:

Raid PVP is better due to the element of control that you have, being able to pick teams and manually control your team if you decide to, it’s definitely a better experience for those who are very interested in the PVP Element of games like this.

Eternal Evolution is great in the opposite way, PVP is entirely auto, and you have the ability to skip to the battle result in arena fights, making it quick and easy to sweep through your daily fights.

These are both benefits in both games, so really it comes down to your preference, if you’re somebody who enjoys getting stuck into PVP, then Raid will be a better experience, whereas if you’re not entirely bothered by PVP, blasting through your fights with the skip function will be preferable to you in Eternal Evolution.

PVP Events:

Raid doesn’t have many PVP Events, other than Classic Arena Takedowns, which just reward you for actually taking part in Arena.

2023 is due to be the Year of PVP for Raid Shadow Legends, so we may see some changes coming to the way we play PVP in Raid, so we will have to keep an eye out.

Eternal Evolution, however, hosts a monthly event called Summit Arena, which we’ve just experienced and it is amazing.

Servers are split off into brackets of several servers, and they’ll begin battling in groups throughout several stages until you reach the Summit Round, where the final 16 will face off in a knock-out style tournament to declare who the winner of the Summit Arena Season is.

For those who are no longer in the Summit Arena, you are able to place “bets” effectively against the fights, where if you correctly guess the winner, you will win gems – which is a nice way of tying in community involvement for those who aren’t able to compete any longer.

Tower:

Raids Doom Tower is brilliant, and the bosses are challenging and give some fantastic rewards on a monthly basis, however, it is capped at 10 fights/day meaning it is a drawn-out process unlike many other games where you can clear it in 1-day every month, this in a way is good because it keeps you coming back every day, but for those who have it on farm, it can get slightly tedious.

The Eternal Evolution tower doesn’t reset, the Soul Mine is almost like an addition to the campaign where you can climb higher and higher and collect rewards as you go, with a server-wide leaderboard to show who is the furthest in the Soul Mine.

There are also Faction Specific mines attached to the Soul Mine similar to Faction Wars, which also provide a fun, unique challenge due to the limitations of only being able to use specific Factions.

Friends/Guilds:

Raids in-game chat features leave us asking for more, it’s never used – to effectively communicate within your Clan in Raid, you will want a Discord Server so that you are able to keep up with your friends, especially due to the lack of direct messaging and friendslists.

Eternal Evolution launched the game with well-built friends and chat systems, where you can directly message your friends, keep up to date in Clan Chat, send guild-wide notification messages, and also see your friend’s progress.

The other thing about the Eternal Evolutions friend system that is great, is IF you have a group of active friends, you can send each other gifts daily, which adds up and you can turn them into summons.

New Player Catch-Up:

Starting as a new player in Raid may feel great because there are tons to do, but realistically, you are never going to catch up to the top level of players, as more and more content comes out, the bigger that gap grows, especially with the pay mechanics in Raid, it is nearly impossible for even long-term players to consistently compete in Platinum Arena without spending thousands of pounds.

Eternal Evolution on the other hand, launches new servers on a regular basis – This will mean anybody who starts on a ‘New’ server will start at the same time, allowing you to be on equal footing with those around you.

Whilst you may not be able to catch up with those who have been playing for months, you will not be playing against them in a competitive sense, as the arena game modes and events are all server-locked.

For the first few weeks of a new server there is a set cycle of events designed to give you access to some of the most important progression heroes in Eternal Evolution as well, so if you are to start this game, be sure to pick a new server.

Pay to Win:

Pay to win in Raid is just getting worse and worse with the addition of features such as Empowerment, Awakening, Artifact Ascension, and so on.

Once upon a time you were able to compete by just having the best Champions, now you need 5 copies of them to +4 them, on top of a good level of awakening for blessings, and gearing is getting harder to match with huge boosts from Artifact Ascension.

The gap between Free to play and Pay to Win has grown so much that if you are a free-to-play or low-spend player, you can’t even consider dreaming of earning a spot in Platinum Arena, which is very worrying with the “Year of PVP” incoming.

All games like this have a Pay to win structure, of course, however, the main benefit is speed – You’ll be able to clear through content faster by enhancing your Heroes to high levels of evolution quickly.

The game feels nicer for those who aren’t paying due to the availability of SSS Champions, and resources to evolve them over time, but if you are spending money you will push through the ranks significantly faster.

One other thing to consider, If you are starting Eternal Evolution on a new server, you will not have to worry about players who have been spending thousands of pounds for the last 6 months or whatever, as everyone will have started on that server at a similar time-point to yourself.

Events:

Raid Events are also very mediocre, with the general goal of Raid Events being “Go do this Dungeon”, “Go pick up some artifacts”, and “Upgrade some artifacts”. It’s just repetitive and has no imagination, as you are doing these things on a daily basis regardless.

Eternal Evolution hosts a variety of events monthly, which give you some huge rewards, such as the Rise of Heroes Event, where you’ll be able to get your hands on an equivalent of an Epic Champion and Max Evolution throughout the 2-week cycle, as well as tons of other incredibly valuable rewards.

Twilight Lands is another Event that is hosted every month, where you can compete with your server to push through some incredibly difficult levels of content and bosses, winning rewards as you go, and based on where you place on your server, you will get some top tier rewards at the end of the event, potentially including some Mythic Prototypes which are like gold dust!

Time:

Time spent in Raid Shadow Legends has been a talking point for as long as we can all remember, and it’s only gotten worse with the addition of more and more things that we need to do.

Granted Plarium has added things such as Super Raids to try and reduce the time we have to spend in the game, but you will still find yourselves spending hours upon hours every single day just to get your daily bits done.

Eternal Evolution has the skip mechanic in many areas of the game, and you can run up to 10 runs of a dungeon at once, with a limit on how many you can do each day, the day-to-day in Eternal Evolution can be done in less than 90 minutes, and you can be done for the day.

Summary:

The scoring from the table below are Hellhades’ opinions and was not in any way meant to be a negative to Raid, but it is clear that Raid does need to consider opening their eyes to the ways that other people are doing things, as there is competition lurking who do certain things better.

Of course, Eternal Evolution is a very new game and things could change and go downhill later on, and hopefully, Raid will pick up on some of its negatives in the not-too-distant future too.

There is one tweak in the table from Hellahades original scoring and that is for the New Player Catch-up, as he forgot about the inclusion of New Servers in Eternal Evolution, which we feel cranks that ranking up to 4.5 since you’re starting on a level playing field with those who you’ll be competing with.

Do you agree with any/all of these Points? Let us know in the comments!