X-Men Legends is a competent, if not especially deep, action-RPG. The gameplay follows
pretty similar to the vein of Diablo where you take your crew into an
area filled with bad guys, beat the crap out of said bad guys, and
level up your powers. There's a pretty interesting story to the game,
and the inclusion of playable classic X-men stories, like "Night of the
Sentinels" or Juggernaut's break-in at the X-Mansion. The graphics do
what they need to do, but are never intended to be all that great. This
game is fun, even if it's a little repetitive.
This game plays sort of like Diablo or Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance,
where you barge into areas filled with enemies, tear them apart using
standard attack combos and unique abilities, and then finish off a
boss. The real difference here is that you move in a squad of four
instead of solo. A pretty quick tap on the d-pad changes who you
control, and you will need to change quite a bit. The controls are
pretty tight, and there are a number of combos that you can do to your
opponents. You'll quickly find that the mutant power combos are
indespensible, as they deal out a ton of damage. The melee attacks
follow a set number of combos that will knock your enemy back, juggle
him, or trip him up.
Some characters are naturally more useful, while others are pretty much
useless (*cough* Beast). The characters all follow a similar pattern.
You can build 2 attack powers, like claw slashes or optic blasts, 1
"buff" like Iceman's ice armor, and 1 "Xtreme" power with which you'll
unleash hell on any onscreen enemies. Also, you get a number of stat
increasing abilities like more HP, mana, and augmenting your attacks
with your abilities, like Iceman adding cold damage to his attacks.
They used cell shading and low detail to provide a comic book feel. It
does what it needs to do, but I'd hardly call it inspired. The
soundtrack is ok, and does a nice thing where it'll play a nice ambient
background until an enemy shows up. Once faced with danger, the sound
maintains the same theme, but picks up into action mode.
As you go through the game, you'll run into 3 types of unlockables.
First, you find sketch books that unlock concept art for the game. Meh.
Also, you'll find comic books that permanently increase the stats of
your X-Men. Naturally they are very useful. Lastly, you'll get CDs that
unlock Danger Room missions. The Danger Room missions are generally
pretty cool, and get nice and tough by the end. I especially like the
character challenges as you get to unload a case of ass whooping using
your favorite character. By far, the coolest unlockable was reliving a
few missions from classic X-Men books. It's cool to see your characters
in their old 70's gear battling against squads of Sentinels.
