X-Men Legends
Good, but not quite the stuff of legends.
Published: October 20, 2004
One of the plusses of the games industry growing exponentially is that games or even entire genres that used to be nothing more than stockpiles of hastily rushed, low budget schlock are slowly getting life breathed into them. The superhero genre wasn't exactly hurting for decent titles, but it wasn't the kind of showcase that racing or role-playing games were for flashy graphics and polished gamely either until games like Spider-Man started popping up and showed that superhero games didn't have to be supercrap.
Perhaps appropriately, Activision's ties with Marvel have yielded yet another solid video game version of what you could read in comic book pages or see on the big screen in the form of X-Men Legends in what can best be described as Gauntlet meets Stan Lee. Much of what Legends is borrows pretty heavily from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, right down to constantly sucking down potions to refill health and mutant power while wading into throngs of enemies.
Like the aforemented updates to the dungeon crawling formula that Gauntlet introduced way back when, elements of role-playing game advancement have been mixed in to add a little variety and incentive to all the button mashing. The various X-Men you can control all gain levels with experience (even those that aren't fighting or are dead, which is a bit odd), allowing them to bulk up their attack, health, defense or energy (for doling out mutant ability-related attacks and effects) and customize each character's unique mutant powers.
It's not a new concept, nor is the storyline involving a young girl named Alison Crestmere who finds herself caught between discovering her newly awakened mutant powers (those being the ability to control lava) and a likely capture at the hands of the Brotherhood of Mutants. In fact, the storyline, like most of the game, feels like it borrows parts of the X-Men movies, some of the different comics and perhaps little bits of the cartoons, making for an odd mishmash of lore and appearances.
Of course, the X-Men come to Alison's aid, and as the game progresses, it becomes apparent what her role in the grand machinations of Magneto, are, and indeed what the head baddie is up to. Alison learns to control her powers by joining Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Students, and serves as a bit of a foil for the newbie's introduction into the X-Men universe if they aren't already acclimated. Alison grills the different X-Men on their powers, origins, relationships and all the other details that you'd have to read reams of comic book lore to pick up on, so it's a nice way to bring everyone up to speed.
It also shows how PS2 development newcomers (or at least full-blown development, since the team has consulted on PC ports in the past) Raven Software -- they of the PC first-person shooter persuasion -- decided to craft the different X-Men's back stories. Most of the details (like costumes and histories) are culled from the Ultimate X-Men mythos, but they're more or less the commonly accepted information, and when combined with the game's obvious visual influence from the big screen translations, you get the impression of a game that has the apparent depth of the comics, but plays more like a movie-to-game translation. Got all that? Good, let's move on.
The game itself plays, again, like an updated and slightly cel-shaded take on Gauntlet, what with the continual guzzling of potions and four-player dungeon crawls. The game screams "multiplayer," I might add, which elevates the fun factor of the game by quite a bit, and is actually how the game should be played if you have a multitap, a couple of friends, a couple beers and a penchant for setting up coordinated attacks).
Tapping X unleashes a quick hit, O provides a slower, more powerful version and tapping the two in various strings yields combos that trip, stun and uppercut enemies into the air (a la Devil May Cry). Holding down R2 turns your X, circle, square and triangle buttons into shortcuts for the various mutant abilities you can learn with experience upgrades, and L2 will call for help from teammates and set up combos, where two characters tag-team an enemy with their mutant abilities, resulting in a huge "COMBO!" scream from the one-lined game announcer and a clever name (i.e. Icy Beam for Cyclops' Optic Beam and Iceman's Freeze Blast).
While the AI can be tweaked to heal itself (or teammates) and engage or ignore enemies, you'll still spend plenty of time taking control of the different characters by hitting their corresponding head image mapped to one of the four d-pad directions at the start of a mission. Extraction points (painfully dubbed "Xtraction" points in the game) allow you to swap out your team if you need access to a environment-specific power (i.e. Iceman's ability to create an ice bridge or put out fires), visit the Danger Room to run simulations and level up your characters, or trade in the Tech Bits that pop out of destroyed objects and enemies for potions or equipment.
Destruction is actually one of the main themes in the game, which is a bit odd considering the X-Men's goal of uniting mutants and humans in peace. I can't imagine a foursome traipsing through the sewers of New York, punching holes through walls is going to smooth things over for those living in fear of what big ass guys in costumes wielding superpowers would do to them if left unchecked, but at least it looks cool when you break everything in sight.
As a whole, the game is pretty solid, through it's not going to win any graphics awards. The pre-rendered sequences are usually relegated to basic intros of the level you're going to be exploring, but there are a couple well-produced cutscenes that move the plot along nicely. The comic-bookish cel-shaded in-game graphics are solid, but too much crowding from characters (particularly in the X-Mansion) leads to slowdown when the camera rotates.
Texture detail is modest as well, with each of the environments offering plenty of variety, and while the game is obviously tile-based, the reuse of objects like poles or generators is either done with an eye for sensibility or in a way that reflects more or less what you'd see in real life. That doesn't excuse the overabundance of breakable barrels and crates (which apparently have someone managed to infect nearly every game on the market), but for the most part the level designs are dense with interactivity (breaking down walls in particular is a lot of fun, especially when they explode in a shower of rubble).
After pouring over the comics for nearly a two decades, and faithfully watching the cartoons, and then eagerly standing in line for both movies, the mind tends to have a pre-conceived idea of what the characters should sound like, and for the post part, Legends delivers a passable aural accompaniment to the on-screen X-Men. On some of the bigger characters, however, usually the ones with accents like Rogue and Nightcrawler fall flat. Rogue in particular falls flat, and many of the other characters sound their part, but lack any real substance that helps bring them to life.
The soundtrack is standard superhero fare, where casually paced tracks provide a basic underlying score, and when enemies approach, a drum track and some guitars layer in on top. It works on a basic interactive level, and at least lets you know where someone on your team is about to engage a bad guy, but it's nothing that's particularly memorable.
Legends is easily the best X-Men game ever to have hit consoles, and die-hards will dig the comic book covers, the concept sketches, the character profiles and the trivia game (correct answers get you a small experience reward), and multiplayer with a couple friends really is a blast (setting up combos is a breeze, and huge tag teams are rife with high-fivin' moments -- y'know, if you're a drunken white frat boy). The storyline is pretty standard fare, though, and the voice acting robs the game of the immersiveness the exploration could've built on top of the action, though the voice work for Alison and Patrick Stewart's Professor X is top-notch.
If you have a couple friends and an afternoon to charge through the game with them, you're going to have a blast. The single-player experience is still fun, but without the lure of real teamwork, the rougher spots of the game tend to punch through to the fore during inopportune times. Hopefully with the inevitable sequel, Raven will learn a bit and come back with a deeper story (one can pray that it's penned by one of the bigger-name comic writers), and more professional voice acting.
Perhaps appropriately, Activision's ties with Marvel have yielded yet another solid video game version of what you could read in comic book pages or see on the big screen in the form of X-Men Legends in what can best be described as Gauntlet meets Stan Lee. Much of what Legends is borrows pretty heavily from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, right down to constantly sucking down potions to refill health and mutant power while wading into throngs of enemies.
Like the aforemented updates to the dungeon crawling formula that Gauntlet introduced way back when, elements of role-playing game advancement have been mixed in to add a little variety and incentive to all the button mashing. The various X-Men you can control all gain levels with experience (even those that aren't fighting or are dead, which is a bit odd), allowing them to bulk up their attack, health, defense or energy (for doling out mutant ability-related attacks and effects) and customize each character's unique mutant powers.
It's not a new concept, nor is the storyline involving a young girl named Alison Crestmere who finds herself caught between discovering her newly awakened mutant powers (those being the ability to control lava) and a likely capture at the hands of the Brotherhood of Mutants. In fact, the storyline, like most of the game, feels like it borrows parts of the X-Men movies, some of the different comics and perhaps little bits of the cartoons, making for an odd mishmash of lore and appearances.
Of course, the X-Men come to Alison's aid, and as the game progresses, it becomes apparent what her role in the grand machinations of Magneto, are, and indeed what the head baddie is up to. Alison learns to control her powers by joining Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Students, and serves as a bit of a foil for the newbie's introduction into the X-Men universe if they aren't already acclimated. Alison grills the different X-Men on their powers, origins, relationships and all the other details that you'd have to read reams of comic book lore to pick up on, so it's a nice way to bring everyone up to speed.
It also shows how PS2 development newcomers (or at least full-blown development, since the team has consulted on PC ports in the past) Raven Software -- they of the PC first-person shooter persuasion -- decided to craft the different X-Men's back stories. Most of the details (like costumes and histories) are culled from the Ultimate X-Men mythos, but they're more or less the commonly accepted information, and when combined with the game's obvious visual influence from the big screen translations, you get the impression of a game that has the apparent depth of the comics, but plays more like a movie-to-game translation. Got all that? Good, let's move on.
The game itself plays, again, like an updated and slightly cel-shaded take on Gauntlet, what with the continual guzzling of potions and four-player dungeon crawls. The game screams "multiplayer," I might add, which elevates the fun factor of the game by quite a bit, and is actually how the game should be played if you have a multitap, a couple of friends, a couple beers and a penchant for setting up coordinated attacks).
Tapping X unleashes a quick hit, O provides a slower, more powerful version and tapping the two in various strings yields combos that trip, stun and uppercut enemies into the air (a la Devil May Cry). Holding down R2 turns your X, circle, square and triangle buttons into shortcuts for the various mutant abilities you can learn with experience upgrades, and L2 will call for help from teammates and set up combos, where two characters tag-team an enemy with their mutant abilities, resulting in a huge "COMBO!" scream from the one-lined game announcer and a clever name (i.e. Icy Beam for Cyclops' Optic Beam and Iceman's Freeze Blast).
While the AI can be tweaked to heal itself (or teammates) and engage or ignore enemies, you'll still spend plenty of time taking control of the different characters by hitting their corresponding head image mapped to one of the four d-pad directions at the start of a mission. Extraction points (painfully dubbed "Xtraction" points in the game) allow you to swap out your team if you need access to a environment-specific power (i.e. Iceman's ability to create an ice bridge or put out fires), visit the Danger Room to run simulations and level up your characters, or trade in the Tech Bits that pop out of destroyed objects and enemies for potions or equipment.
Destruction is actually one of the main themes in the game, which is a bit odd considering the X-Men's goal of uniting mutants and humans in peace. I can't imagine a foursome traipsing through the sewers of New York, punching holes through walls is going to smooth things over for those living in fear of what big ass guys in costumes wielding superpowers would do to them if left unchecked, but at least it looks cool when you break everything in sight.
As a whole, the game is pretty solid, through it's not going to win any graphics awards. The pre-rendered sequences are usually relegated to basic intros of the level you're going to be exploring, but there are a couple well-produced cutscenes that move the plot along nicely. The comic-bookish cel-shaded in-game graphics are solid, but too much crowding from characters (particularly in the X-Mansion) leads to slowdown when the camera rotates.
Texture detail is modest as well, with each of the environments offering plenty of variety, and while the game is obviously tile-based, the reuse of objects like poles or generators is either done with an eye for sensibility or in a way that reflects more or less what you'd see in real life. That doesn't excuse the overabundance of breakable barrels and crates (which apparently have someone managed to infect nearly every game on the market), but for the most part the level designs are dense with interactivity (breaking down walls in particular is a lot of fun, especially when they explode in a shower of rubble).
After pouring over the comics for nearly a two decades, and faithfully watching the cartoons, and then eagerly standing in line for both movies, the mind tends to have a pre-conceived idea of what the characters should sound like, and for the post part, Legends delivers a passable aural accompaniment to the on-screen X-Men. On some of the bigger characters, however, usually the ones with accents like Rogue and Nightcrawler fall flat. Rogue in particular falls flat, and many of the other characters sound their part, but lack any real substance that helps bring them to life.
The soundtrack is standard superhero fare, where casually paced tracks provide a basic underlying score, and when enemies approach, a drum track and some guitars layer in on top. It works on a basic interactive level, and at least lets you know where someone on your team is about to engage a bad guy, but it's nothing that's particularly memorable.
Legends is easily the best X-Men game ever to have hit consoles, and die-hards will dig the comic book covers, the concept sketches, the character profiles and the trivia game (correct answers get you a small experience reward), and multiplayer with a couple friends really is a blast (setting up combos is a breeze, and huge tag teams are rife with high-fivin' moments -- y'know, if you're a drunken white frat boy). The storyline is pretty standard fare, though, and the voice acting robs the game of the immersiveness the exploration could've built on top of the action, though the voice work for Alison and Patrick Stewart's Professor X is top-notch.
If you have a couple friends and an afternoon to charge through the game with them, you're going to have a blast. The single-player experience is still fun, but without the lure of real teamwork, the rougher spots of the game tend to punch through to the fore during inopportune times. Hopefully with the inevitable sequel, Raven will learn a bit and come back with a deeper story (one can pray that it's penned by one of the bigger-name comic writers), and more professional voice acting.
