Played on:
Xbox
The success of action-RPG titles on consoles has spurred on many clones. First we saw D&D-based fantasy games, then it was Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, then Sony's Everquest-themed Champions of Norrath, and now it's X-Men Legends. They all share some similar gameplay, which is mostly top-down hack and slash with some light roleplay elements thrown in.
X-Men: Legends has you taking on classic Marvel baddies as your favorite mutant heroes, and unlike most of the X-Men games that have been released over the years, this one's actually pretty damn good. While the RPG elements are lighter here than some players might expect, it's still got enough depth to be worth more than a rental.
If you've played any game that's even remotely similar to X-Men Legends, you will have no trouble picking up this game in seconds flat. There are a few differences, though: there is a bit less of a focus on having a large selection of special abilities, and more of a focus on standard attacks. To that end, your character has two attack buttons, and a jump button - which, in this game, actually is useful in combat.
Switching to special attacks is pretty easy, as you simply hold down the right trigger and press one of the normal face buttons to unleash one of four pre-set moves. You can also set these up with relative ease, and there are a couple of available characters that you'll want to switch specials out on pretty often.
The game includes real combos here that come when you press attacks in various sequences. These combos can turn out to be devastating, but they can also leave you wide open to enemy attacks, so you have to be careful which ones you use against certain enemies. On top of this, characters can perform combos along with the other characters, so there are plenty of opportunities to switch up attacks.
I'm not really sure here, but X-Men Legends might be the first X-Men game with cel-shaded graphics. And the game uses them well, animating the characters with the comic-style graphics while keeping the environments looking more like you'd expect in a modern game.
The special effects in this game are exceptional, and the animations are nearly perfect as well. Some of the environments look a little simplistic, but once you get to the areas that have a ton of action going on at once, you will understand why. Even when there's a ton of stuff going on at the same time, the frame rate in the Xbox version is solid just about all of the time.
The real problem comes when the game tries to show you cutscenes - while the cel-shaded graphics look great from a distance, they are hideous when seen from up close. Mouths refuse to move, the characters' faces are terrible, and the cutscenes lose any of their effect when you see your beloved X-Men in this mangled form. Again, from a distance they look great, but these models don't nearly hold up as well once you zoom the camera in. The game does include pre-rendered cinematics that fare better, but Raven should have stuck with those as much as they possibly could have.
Despite X-Men Legends' many predecessors, this game still manages to do some new stuff when it comes to gameplay. The most obvious thing you'll notice after a few minutes is that the game's AI can control other X-Men while you play at the same time. None of the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance-style games to date have done this, and it makes the single player mode quite a bit more fun.
With this AI comes a few basic guidelines you can give to your AI buddies - you can direct them to use special attacks at crucial times, as well as give them general "scripts" on how to play - for example, you want to set Cyclops and Storm as mostly ranged attackers, while a guy like Wolverine needs to close in for melee attacks. You can even set up your AI teammates to heal other team members when they get low, although switching between AI scripts has to be done from the menus rather than right from the game. The AI hangs at a few spots, accidentally getting stuck or even falling off a cliff, and there's an annoyance in having to pay to revive stupid AI characters that get killed.
