I've been waiting for years for a smart, licensed super hero game. After X-Men: Legends, I'm still waiting. It's not a terrible game - it's one of the better super-hero titles out there, plus cops a classic Gauntlet feel for multiplayer - but it's not a particularly great game either.
What is it about the super hero genre that remains so utterly elusive to game designers? I believe it has everything to do with the characters themselves. Almost by definition, super heroes contain infinite potential. Their powers are so varied and so incredible that they refuse to be dumbed down to the constraints of a video game, where everything needs to be controlled by a handful of button presses. And as soon as your favorite character can't do something that happens every other page in the comics, you feel let down and the representation doesn't ring true.
Naturally, it's all due from concessions to video games themselves. In Superman: Shadow of Apokolips, there are a couple levels that pit Superman against a time limit. I've read enough Superman stories where he runs up against a time limit, and yeah, sometimes he fails... but most of the time, it's not even an issue. He's Superman. Moving fast is but one of his many powers. When you're that familiar with the character and the game artificially weakens his abilities just to slap together a level... well, that's exactly why nobody thinks super hero games are any good. At least Shadow of Apokolips didn't go the route of Superman 64 and coat every level in a flaw-obscuring, power-crippling "Kryptonite Fog."
Take X-Men: Legends. Cyclops, for example. His optic blast is powerful enough to burn a hole through an average human body. And yet, X-Men: Legends spends the entire game with Cyclops firing off red energy blasts at the most normal of foes and it still takes hit after hit after hit for him to kill somebody. Every character in the game suffers from this: the X-Men are always in danger of being offed by a bunch of low-level non-powered human jerks. Colossus can pick a guy up, throw him across the room into a brick wall, and he'll get right back up. Around every corner is another nest of these guys... it makes you wonder why the human race considers mutants a threat at all.
There's plenty of writers' crutches you could use to explain it away... the X-Men are pulling their punches because they're fighting relatively innocent humans, Magneto has engineered a special energy field that dampens the X-Men's powers (Kryptonite Fog), everybody has amazing mutant-proof armor. But it doesn't matter because they're all stupid. The problem is the separation between what makes a good video game (action) and what makes a good comic book (story). Action necessitates that you spend hours confronting hordes of enemies, unleashing your powers with glorious abandon, and working your way towards the really big fights for the climatic conclusion. In order for that to make sense, the established abilities of the characters are always ratcheted down to Power Pack levels. On the comics side, adventures are always pitting one group of heroes against an evenly matched group of villains, usually with tons of planning and foreshadowing, followed by tons of dialogue and drama, and ending with a massive one-time-only battle. Why can't we get a video game that duplicates that?
X-Men: Legends tries to be that game. To wit, the game has a superficial layer of RPG on it... which means skill trees, branching conversations and customizable items. And under that is the game's gooey center of old fashioned button mashing action. The concept is that the combination of both approaches will offer the visceral action gamers desire and the deep story to which comics fans are accustomed. The final result is mediocre, an uneven and often confusing adventure that greatly favors the action half (which probably was the best choice.)
Once you've made your peace with the dulled edges of Wolverine's claws, there is plenty of action to be had. You always have four X-Men onscreen at a time, selected from an impressive list of potentials, all with distinct powers (although most reduce down to a better punch, a better kick, a shield and a mega-move) and presentation (unique voice samples and skill trees.) From a save point, you can swap in any other character... which is a must when you need to create a bridge to continue but forget to start the level with Iceman. If you don't have four human players, the rest will be AI controlled. That works about as well as you would expect. Most of the time, they'll happily fight (you can individually select each AI's level of aggression), but they won't always know when to use their powers to the fullest, and they tend to stand in doorframes blocking the path.
The mutant powers are handled very well, making combat the only part of the game worth playing. Good news that it's the biggest part. Your four buttons cover two types of attack, jump, and grab. The attacks vary among the heroes, usually some form of punching, kicking, or whacking with a prop (like Gambit's staff.) The jump is very normal, but flying characters can double jump into a nice hover. Grabbing is fun, since you can quickly jerk the analog stick and toss your victim into a wall or a fellow X-Man. These are just the normal attacks, however, holding down the right shoulder button acts as a shift key to activate your mutant powers.
Once you shift, the four attack buttons change to your character's mutant powers. Shift-A and shift-B are usually a stronger attack, often a distance attack... but sometimes just a beefier and weirder melee move. For example, Cyclops' shift-A is his classic energy visor shot, and shift-B is more of a wide angle beam. The variations between characters is slight, but there... one of Storm's moves calls down lightning, the difference between her and Cyclops is that her distance attack enters the screen vertically while his is horizontal.
Shift-Y is a shield for most characters, or at least some sort of temporary stats boost. Once you level up a bit, you can add the shield to any teammates standing near you. Iceman's shift-Y armors up with spikes on his back and hands... and any X-Men within range will also grow ice hands for an attack boost.
Shift-X is the big mega power, the type that tends to wipe a room clean of enemies. You can only pull off the mega move when you have collected a full X symbol on a separate meter that is shared between all the players. You'll know you're charged up when you hear the embarrassing "EXTREME!" voice sample play. The rest of the moves drain energy from a secondary blue power meter right below your normal red life meter.
There is a strange combo system that calls out Mad Lib style named attacks when characters combine their attacks. There's nothing magical about it; it just happens when two characters happen to use a mutant attack at more or less the same time. To name the combo, the game grabs from an array of pre chosen words... "bestial" for Wolverine, "surge" for Storm, etc. So if the game screams Optic Chill! at you, that probably means Cyclops and Iceman just attacked simultaneously. My favorite one is "devitalizing" for Rogue. It's a bit silly.
Every kill doles out experience points, which are appropriately distributed among all the X-Men, even those not in your party. So you won't have a level 70 Wolverine and a level 10 Jubilee by the end of the game, you'll have roughly equivalent levels on all of them. IE, the game doesn't punish you for always playing your favorites and force you to field a horribly underpowered character when you feel like using someone new. Experience points, in the grand role playing tradition, are turned into skill points for use in upping your attributes and buying new abilities.
Now here's where it gets stupid. Each character has a unique skill tree where you can painstakingly distribute your points. Or you can hit the Auto button. Yes, the game is willing to do the heavy lifting for you and assign the skill points where it wants them. So why even bother annoying me with a skill tree at all? Just have the team level up and gain new abilities as they go. It's a false sense of depth, especially considering that, once you buy all the skills, the simple act of upgrading them an increment at a time doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
Besides, the characters are good at what they're good at. You don't have the numerical freedom to turn Jubilee into a massive hand-to-hand fighter. (Especially since there's no replay or second quest after you beat the game.) Jube is going to remain the little-used energy fighter, and the team's resident tough guys will keep doing all the punching. The only point to the skill trees is to open up all four mutant powers (per X-Man) and gradually increase the damage ranges for each one.
Each character has three inventory slots, but here we have the same problem again. Who cares? You can give Beast a belt that adds to his attack, or a jacket that helps him heal faster... but the modifications are so minor that it's just busywork. There are rare items that offer more advancements, including major bonuses against specific enemies, but come on... this game runs on how fast I hit the A button, not on whatever dumbass item I'm holding. You could go through the entire game without ever distributing items or personalizing your team's ablities, and that's the ugly truth. It just ain't that complicated, and yet all the custom trappings desperately try to make it seem like it is.
Every RPG element in the game gets in the way. The skills aren't especially involving, the few items characters can hold are similarly boring (all of them pure mathematical stat increasers), and the text conversations are full of lame writing and grade school dialogue... it always reads like someone's My First X-Men Fanfic. Not to mention that the storyline is barely cohesive, with missions coming one after the other having almost no relation to what went before. Almost as if it was intended to be more freeform, more GTA, but turned into a strict linear path at the last minute. Every combat level ends with the text message "You successfully accomplished your goals... but your mission isn't over yet!" and you're warped back to the X-Mansion for another drawn out interlude where rookie X-Man Magma has to roam the entire building talking to people again. You just want to get the dull nonsense over with so you and your three friends can get back to pounding on generic, cloned bad guys.
Not that every action level is a winner. Most are far too long, and far too many environments are repeated throughout the game (we're heading into the Astral Plane again?!?) At times, they're wildly inconsistent. One level will be a cakewalk, constantly tossing free health-ups at you, and the next will be complete misery, tons of powerful grunts and no health to be found. And then the next level will be super-easy again!
A couple levels (too few, for my money) let you play a classic X-Men confrontation of the past, like the first time Juggernaut attacked the Mansion. For extra authenticity, your characters in these levels will appear in their older costumes! A nice touch.
You'll hit camera troubles regularly, since most of the worlds are tight quarters. Sometimes you'll walk through an archway and the game won't turn it transparent, so it ends up blocking your view. Or it will require somebody to manually rotate it so everyone can get out from behind a wall. There will be a lot of "where the hell am I" moments.
The visuals are nothing special. Most of the worlds are perfectly fine, if redundant... the Morlocks' sewers contain about a million old mattresses and ratty bookcases. The Astral Plane, being all ghostly and see-through, can be a bitch to navigate. Sometimes you won't see the dropoff until somebody has already walked off of it. That level also has a few floating platforms that always risk killing everyone on the team if one player floats too far ahead. All in all, the graphics throughout are serviceable, not amazing.
The characters, however, really suffer during in-game cutscenes. They're blurry and unpolished. During normal play, the camera is pulled out enough that you don't notice. Although it can be easy to lose who you're playing when the screen gets filled with three other X-Men and a horde of enemies. Especially if you're not a fan and don't have everybody's costume imprinted on your memory. I mean, I can pick out a Psylocke vs. a Jean Grey at 900 yards, but not everyone is that into the source material.
The game does try at fan service, but in an age with multiple continuities stretched across multiple media, who can keep up? The unlockables cover this ground, despite stinking up the X-Mansion with detailed lists of nothing. Sketchbook pictures, character bios, comic covers, the usual. Why would the developers think we would want to "collect" loading screens? There's even a trivia game that rewards correct answers with experience points, but it was mostly softballs. You'll also unlock just about every character in the game (good and bad) for use in Skirmish Mode, a sort of low-impact Smash Bros. that exists outside the main game.
X-Men Legends is a step up, compared to the usual dreck we get out of comics based games. They did their homework for the fans, included plenty of playable characters, provided an intuitive control scheme for the mutant powers, and did four player combat in a suitably frenetic arcade style. Given the linear construction, the ballyhooed RPG elements translate into a minor headache... this is a wild child that was forced to comb its hair and go to church anyway. The storyline, for all the dull-as-doorknobs voice acting and slow, plodding branching conversations, never becomes any more epic (or sensical) than the old 4P X-Men Arcade game... it's just one X-pastiche after another, with the expected parade of villains and the even more expected parade of palette-swapped, heavily armored grunts. Get four players and enjoy the action, for there's not much else there.
