X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse
More of the same mutie-fueled hack 'n slash action, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Published: October 17, 2005
Sadly, once the buzz of having Bishop, Magneto, Rogue and Juggernaut on the same team wears off, it's made rather apparent that the core of the game was more or less left untouched. Sure, the levels have more stuff to break, but that just equals more button mashing, and after about the third chapter, I started to just want to take the fight straight to Apocalypse instead of messing with his Horsemen bosses at the end of every chapter.
There was an attempt to add a little more variety to things by taking the game online, and in theory, it's fantastic. Getting together with friends and doing a cross-country tag-team beat-down is awesome, but severe lag, excessive load times and a poorly handled system for juggling character upgrades and equipment swaps all drag the experience down to the point where it'd better be with friends, and ones that can listen and organize moves, or the whole experience becomes a choppy, disorganized mess.
Choppy is actually something that the whole game suffers from at times. Most of the time, it's not too bad, but bigger boss fights where lots of mutant powers and tons of enemies are being thrown around causes the engine to take a quick dive. If it weren't for the fact that the game still feels remarkably like the first one with a bit more interaction, it wouldn't be a big deal, but there weren't any significant (or at least apparent) upgrades that would account for the dives. There's more stuff on screen, sure, but that should have been a design consideration from the start.
The interface, too, is a mess, if only for the fact that it's not particularly intuitive and just getting to it means waiting for the PS2 to load up all the goods. Forget quick swap-outs or simple leveling boosts, I finally just gave up and waited until everyone had leveled before I headed into the menus to start suping up my characters, which boiled down to about five or six regulars because of all the excess loading.
I'm not trying to harp on the graphics per se, because they're certainly suitable for the content, it's just that the presentation was never all that stellar to begin with, and having to slog through slow, cumbersome menus exacerbates the problem. Hell, even the videos were encoded at a low resolution and then stretched to fit, leading to some pretty unsightly artifacting that ruins the polish that Blur Studio's work must've had when it was first mastered.
Here too, the audio seems stunted. Very few, flat-sounding effects, some basic ambient tunes that never really seem to stick all that well to the game and questionable voice acting for about a third of the characters makes for something that's actually a little embarrassing to listen to. If it weren't for the fact that your characters are constantly yapping, it wouldn't be a huge deal, but they yammer on, usually with no real interesting comments a bit too much and when coupled with a particularly bad vocal performance, it's something you hope nobody overhears.
Even with these nagging problems (and believe me, I'm nitpicking because I care), the game is still fun to play, especially with even one friend. It's a party game, and one for comic nerds that actually socialize and freely discuss some of the more subtle references in the game.
Sure, it's a decent hack and slash, but it's more fanservice than anything else, because there are prettier, more refined dungeon crawls out there. None of them offer the ability for a metallic guy in to throw a dude with claws into a pack of bugs, though, and for some that may just be enough to make the game must-have. For everyone else, it's a solid entry, and one that bests its predecessor by a long stretch, but it's still not a universal offering.
