Hands-on with Hearthstone's infamous Chinese clone

There’s been a lot of news over the last few days about Blizzard and Netease (Blizzard’s Chinese distributor) taking legal action against an alleged Hearthstone clone. The company accused of creating and distributing this clone is Unico Interactive, a mobile game development company based out of Shanghai. The game in question is The Legend of the Sleeping Dragon whose logo itself seems suspiciously similar to Blizzard’s famous card game.

However few sites seem to have actually played The Legend of the Crouching Dragon so it seems only fair to give the game a whirl and find out exactly how much of case Blizzard has. The game is available for Android and jailbroken iOS only.

These battles look familiar

The core mechanics of The Legend of the Crouching Dragon are identical to Hearthstone. There’s the slowly increasing mana, the scenic battle areas and of course the player characters abilities.

The battles really do feel like a straight copy of Hearthstone and what I find very strange is Unico Interactive’s blatantness about this.

Their home page proudly shows pictures of people playing The Legend of the Crouching Dragon on big screen TVs and android tablets. My god they even have booth babes!

These are not the actions of a company that is sneaking around, Unico Interactive has been shouting from the mountain tops and I just can’t understand what they thought was going to happen.

Re-skinned cards

In Scotland we have a word to describe those who are always trying to get a free pint, or make a quick buck, they are referred to as “chancers” and Unico Interactive just made the top of my chancer list.