Marvel's
X-Men dominate the comic book world, rule a merchandising
empire and have two excellent movies with a third one on
the way. Their foray into video games, however, has been
a mixed bag. The team translates well into fighting games
where their powers can be used to humiliate your friends,
but any time they have left that genre, the games have been
sub par.
Activision
has changed all that with the release of X-Men: Legends,
a role playing game. Gameplay is from a top down, 3D perspective
similar to Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu or Hunter:
Reckoning. Controlling a team of four X-Men, you'll
fight all the major X-Men villains, racking up experience
as you further the story.
You begin the game playing only as Wolverine. He witnesses
the Brotherhood kidnapping a young mutant girl named Allison
Crestmere (Magma) and your first mission is to rescue her.
Before long other X-Men will join you and then the butt
kicking begins.
Four different players can control four different X-Men
during play with the computer filling in when your friends
aren't around. If you are playing alone, you'll be able
to switch which character you control on the fly. You can
give minor tweaks to the computer controlled players AI
including what attacks they use and how aggressively they
fight. Colossus should probably be the one to charge into
the room full of Sentinels, while the far more fragile Jean
Grey hangs back and provides support.
Missions
can be completed by any combination of team members you
use but some will be better suited for the task. For example,
if you had to get something on the other side of a locked
door, Beast would have to smash through the wall which would
alert nearby guards. If you had Nightcrawler on your team,
you could just BAMF! through the wall. Another example,
Storm could weld a nearby door shut to prevent guards from
coming through or Wolverine could just kill them all.
Every level in the game features fully interactive and
destructible environments meaning everything is open season
during battles. The levels themselves vary in atmosphere
from city streets to snow covered mountains to Morlock infested
sewers. Also throughout each level are extraction points
that players can access to spend experience points, swap
characters, purchase new equipment, revive fallen players,
groom Beast's hair and other generic party maintenance.
Each
X-Man is able to augment their strength, speed, body, and
mind skills by completing missions and gaining experience.
You'll also gain new attacks specific to your character's
mutant ability (weather related for Storm, blender related
for Wolverine, etc…). Passive skills, such as flight, super
strength and regeneration, are also available to certain
characters.
The fighting has a lot of variety to it. Not only does
each character have their own set of combos but each pairing
of mutants will have a unique combo. Ice Man and Cyclops
will have a different dual attack than Ice Man and Gambit.
Performing team combos yields extra experience. I am by
no means a game player that is good at pulling off combos,
but the controls are easy enough that even I can pull a
few off when I need to.
Patrick Stewart raises the bar on the voice acting team
as he narrates the game as Professor X. He is the only X-Men
movie cast member that voices his own character but the
rest of the voice actors do a good enough job.
Cinematic sequences are total eye candy for X-Men fans
and almost worth the price of the game alone. Gameplay graphics
are unique in that the X-Men have a cell shaded quality
to them but the levels don't. This makes the X-Men really
stand out against the background but unfortunately doesn't
give them as much detail as I would have liked. I really
want to be able to see the blood on Wolverine's claws and
that's just not possible here.
The real meat of the game is in playing it (duh) and X-Men:
Legends delivers where it counts. The action is engaging
and fun both in single and multi-player. The game is long
and filled with bonus material like character bios, a trivia
game, comic books and playable "flashbacks" where the X-Men
resemble Jack Kirby's original designs instead of the more
contemporary Ultimate Marvel look.
