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The X-Men enter a new genre. Raven Software has taken the X-Men from their fighting game norm into the complicated world of role playing games. The result is a surprisingly natural, action-RPG that remains fun to play through during its length.
X-Men Legends’ story is unique to the game and doesn’t follow any particular comic series nor does it follow the plots of either movie. You’ll meet up with Wolverine first, but eventually you’ll find familiar X-Men characters like Cyclops, Gambit, Jean, Beast and less common but still cool characters like Iceman, Emma Frost, and Psylocke. All in all you’ll be able to control up to 15 characters (four at a time) and the game does an excellent job of filling you in with all of the little details.
The actual gameplay of X-Men Legends is similar to Snowblind Studios’ Champions of Norrath (and BG: Dark Alliance before it). The game is very much an action-RPG and as such goals basically rely on you to get somewhere while making sure you pick up whatever you need. The game allows you to quickly change between any of the four X-Men you have selected for combat, which is a great touch. You’ll spend a good bit of time choosing the four combat characters and then figuring out which you should control and which you should give to the AI.
The bulk of the game is fighting the many enemies you’ll find and trust me, there are a lot of enemies to find. Thankfully, fighting is enjoyable due to the characters’ unique abilities and other standard attacks. Each character has four special powers unique to them. One of them is the “biggie” like Cyclops’ room-clearing beam or Wolverine’s incredible rage attack, but they also have two additional, smaller moves and one which will boost a specific stat for a bit. All in all, the game uses the characters’ abilities efficiently and they’re quite fun to pull off.
Being an RPG, the game requires you to level up a bit to keep going. By fighting bravely and completing objectives, you’ll gain experience points which you can used to increase your energy, offense, defense and health. You’ll also be able to increase the useful of the characters’ abilities including the mutant powers. Since there is an abundance of enemies to find, and plenty of health along the way, the leveling up never becomes too tedious and it’s cool to see your characters get progressively better.
If there is some thing you cannot complain about in X-Men Legends, it is the game’s longevity. Although the single player adventure is like nineteen or so hours, you’ll find additional missions including flashback missions where you’ll take on a past mission (as in not related to this game’s story) and you can spend time chatting with other X-Men in the mansion or practicing in the Danger Room.
Raven Software also included a nifty cooperative mode that lets you play with actual players instead of giving characters to the AI. And it is even better because you don’t need to worry about separate co-op and single-player games, if a person leaves the AI simply takes over. There is also an adversarial mode that lets you partake in a quick battle with your X-Men (1-4 players), and meet up with many of the game’s enemies like Sabretooth, Havok and Juggernaut, who are also playable characters.
The game’s visuals are technically solid with nicely animated cel-shaded characters and 3D (but not cel-shaded) detail-laden environments. The aforementioned environments are rather interactable and take a good deal of damage, which is always a plus. The particle effects system in the game is excellent, which is great considering how often you’ll see them on-screen. Raven Software did a great job of porting the game to PlayStation 2 as there are very little differences compared to the other platforms. Unsurprisingly, this version omits progressive scan support.
The game’s background music is appropriate and highly interactive as you’ll notice it slow down when there is no action on-screen (doesn’t happen often) and start back up when trouble approaches. The sound effects do a convincing job at portraying the on-screen chaos. The voice acting in the game, when actually used, is quite solid and adds to the X-Men atmosphere. Unfortunately, because of the game’s design which lets you use whatever characters you want, much of the dialogue in the game is text-only as it would take too much space to read each line with each character. The audio is brought to life with in-game Dolby Pro Logic II, which is just excellent like always.
Raven Software took the X-Men franchise and appropriate molded it into a satisfying action RPG in its own right. The addition of the X-Men license and the unique characters and abilities that come with it is just icing on the cake, as the kids say.
-- Edited by Jose Liz -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Oct 4, 2004
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