X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse
It’s portable, and it’s online. But is it any good?
Published: October 21, 2005
The transition to the PSP meant lower polygonal detail overall, which is fine, but the actual texture work and even the lighting look almost identical to the bigger brother, which is damned impressive. The movies mentioned earlier take nice advantage of the PSP’s MPEG-4 decoding, which leads to videos with more dithering for size reasons, but nowhere near the artifacting and compression wonkiness from the PS2 version.
It’s hard not to get into the framerate issues, which can be absolutely horrible during crowded boss fights, and it makes keeping up with what attacks are being made when big hits come almost impossible at times. It’s almost unfair to criticize it because of all the stuff that is there, content-wise, but it’s a near constant reminder that you’re playing on a system that’s seriously underpowered next to even the PS2.
My biggest gripe with the PSP port isn’t the framerate or the decreased detail in the characters (they still sport tons of animation detail anyway, so it’s not really an issue save for when the camera zooms in for cutscenes). Instead, I’m pissed that more work wasn’t done to take advantage of the screen’s 16:9 aspect ratio.
All of the interface details on the pause menus and loading screens is patterned off of the original console GUI, which still had to take into account 4:3 screens. This alone isn’t a huge deal, but when coupled with the incredibly small font size and generally undersized text readouts for everything, it doesn’t take advantage of the PSP’s screen at all, and makes the whole thing seem rushed, even if a ton of content was added.
The audio, however, is damned impressive, if only for the fact that Vicarious Visions managed to cram nearly all the voiceovers, music, ambient effects and core sound effects in with minimal loss in fidelity. Dynamic music, ambient noise and plenty of chatter is all loaded in and runs perfectly. Yes, you’ll still have to listen to some of those more ridiculous voice acting performances, but at least you can hear them in full.
When it comes down to it, this is simply a case of quantity over quality of play. With a modest framerate at best and a choppy mess during the worst moments, it’s not a game that screams polish. The content Vicarious Visions added is fantastic, and in some ways delves deeper into the X-Men mythos with the comic book missions and extra unlockables than even Raven initially did with the console versions.
The question you have to ask yourself is, “did I dig the gameplay enough from the start to want more of it to feed my geek need for more X-Men stuff?” Regardless of the platform, I still feel the game’s too much of the same thing. The PSP port is admirable, but it’s not like VV was going to rewrite the whole thing to add something else.
Instead they piggy-backed off of what was already there, and in terms of lore, it’s extensive. Technical issues do interfere, though, so it’s a matter of seeing past those to get to the gameplay, and if you didn’t like that on the consoles, you’re going to hate it here.
