X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse
Raven's sequel lets you play as the good, the bad and the ugly.
Published: September 6, 2005
The massive Age of Apocalypse storyline was one of the biggest crossovers Marvel ever tried to pull. It linked, destroyed and rewrote entire swatches of the X-Men mythos, and created some of the coolest spin-off characters and takes on familiar heroes and villains that the series had ever seen.
It also did something incredibly cool: it linked the X-Men (and various X-Something sideteams) with their greatest enemies, and all because they realized that there was a bigger threat at hand, namely a giant, mutant-crushing monster known as Apocalypse that wanted nothing more than the enslavement or eradication of the entire mutant race. Humans had tried this before with the Sentinels, but Apocalypse commanded the Four Horsemen, impossibly powerful mutants that were turned to serve his design.
It was an awesome, epic crossover event for comics in the mid-ninties - and it was perhaps the turning point in a trend that would see far too many variant chromium foil-stamped ultra collectors' edition covers that served no purpose but to make some of us dead broke while trying to collect the various threads of the storylines. Sure, you didn't have to buy all the books; the main crossover happened in just handful of the main ones, but to get the full experience and see how the events affected the full X-Universe, it was the end of a lot of comic fans' budgets.
Given that the whole thing was so epic, and so rife with opportunity for translation into another medium (the X-Men cartoon took a stab at it), that it's a wonder that it wasn't at least attempted before. Luckily, we already had one impressively successful X-Men game, and the sequel opens the door for the perfect transition into tackling all the comics' storylines in a more hardcore way.
This is, in a nutshell, what developer Raven Software did. Whereas the first game was there to hook casual and hardcore comic fans alike with a simple four-player co-op superhero experience, the second seems aimed more squarely at the hardcore fans, who were a bit turned off by the light grazing of themes and scattered mishmash of comic and movie references. By handling arguably the biggest thing to ever happen to Marvel continuity, they're giving a decided nod to the comic geeks.
Those that aren't all nerded out by the prospect of an AoA game needn't worry. For all intents and purposes, we're still dealing with the same basic game here. Raven upgraded the engine, tweaked things a bit to allow for more complex environments with better texture detail and increased the focus on bringing multiple players into the experience at once. This means, that at a glance, even big fans of the last game would probably be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the games save for the fact that a screenshot might show a place or a character that wasn't seen in the previous game.
It makes things a bit difficult to preview, since the hour or so we had with the game felt, well familiar to say the least, but the volume of the venue meant we really couldn't check out the storyline or characters. We did see how the leveling system stayed more or less similar to the last game, where you could spend points to upgrade powers and abilities selectively, or just opt to let the computer do it for you, but the increase in the available number of powers and the level caps on them meant there was a lot more to unlock per character.
It also did something incredibly cool: it linked the X-Men (and various X-Something sideteams) with their greatest enemies, and all because they realized that there was a bigger threat at hand, namely a giant, mutant-crushing monster known as Apocalypse that wanted nothing more than the enslavement or eradication of the entire mutant race. Humans had tried this before with the Sentinels, but Apocalypse commanded the Four Horsemen, impossibly powerful mutants that were turned to serve his design.
It was an awesome, epic crossover event for comics in the mid-ninties - and it was perhaps the turning point in a trend that would see far too many variant chromium foil-stamped ultra collectors' edition covers that served no purpose but to make some of us dead broke while trying to collect the various threads of the storylines. Sure, you didn't have to buy all the books; the main crossover happened in just handful of the main ones, but to get the full experience and see how the events affected the full X-Universe, it was the end of a lot of comic fans' budgets.
Given that the whole thing was so epic, and so rife with opportunity for translation into another medium (the X-Men cartoon took a stab at it), that it's a wonder that it wasn't at least attempted before. Luckily, we already had one impressively successful X-Men game, and the sequel opens the door for the perfect transition into tackling all the comics' storylines in a more hardcore way.
This is, in a nutshell, what developer Raven Software did. Whereas the first game was there to hook casual and hardcore comic fans alike with a simple four-player co-op superhero experience, the second seems aimed more squarely at the hardcore fans, who were a bit turned off by the light grazing of themes and scattered mishmash of comic and movie references. By handling arguably the biggest thing to ever happen to Marvel continuity, they're giving a decided nod to the comic geeks.
Those that aren't all nerded out by the prospect of an AoA game needn't worry. For all intents and purposes, we're still dealing with the same basic game here. Raven upgraded the engine, tweaked things a bit to allow for more complex environments with better texture detail and increased the focus on bringing multiple players into the experience at once. This means, that at a glance, even big fans of the last game would probably be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the games save for the fact that a screenshot might show a place or a character that wasn't seen in the previous game.
It makes things a bit difficult to preview, since the hour or so we had with the game felt, well familiar to say the least, but the volume of the venue meant we really couldn't check out the storyline or characters. We did see how the leveling system stayed more or less similar to the last game, where you could spend points to upgrade powers and abilities selectively, or just opt to let the computer do it for you, but the increase in the available number of powers and the level caps on them meant there was a lot more to unlock per character.
