Overall the game was a huge improvement over the original but in the
level designs. They're bigger and less linear, but still generic
looking and boring.
----------Battle System----------
X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse is a 3rd person / top down
view Action / Dungeon Crawling RPG. Just about everything is the same
from the last game, so I'll try to spend this time talking about the
differences.
When you level up you gain 4 stat points and 1 skill points. You
can gain up to 99 levels in this one, unlike the previous 45 level cap.
You can talk to Forge and buy skill points or even buy a level up.
There's more items to pick up in this game, but you can still only
hold 20 items at a time. There's a new box at your base called the
"Hero Stash", in this you can place up to 60 items in there to hold for
you for later. You have to be at a certain level to equip about 90% of
the items in the game. Most of the time the items you find are always
10 levels ahead of your characters, so they can't be useable for a
number of hours. This is one of the biggest annoyances.
You can still find Comics, Sketches and Danger Room discs, but
they also added Tech Stations, 6 Homing Beacons and 4 Data Discs per
Act. The Tech stations boosts your stats permanently for which ever
character that touches it. If you collect 4 Homing Beacons Blink will
open a special warp at your base and you can find Iron Man's protective
body, by the end of the game you'll save Iron Man and he'll join your
party. The other 2 Homing Beacons in the level turn into EXP points
(similar to the Stat points in the last game). If you get four Data
Discs you'll be able to hold more healing items.
There's more bosses and minibosses in the game. The way you end up
fighting most of them are more creative than the last game, but they're
also easier to defeat also. I only had trouble with one boss (Sugar
Man), mostly because he caught me off guard and I wasn't ready to fight
a boss at that point. I beat the final boss in the game with no
problem, but in the first game the final boss messed me up. There was a
few bosses that actually yelled out their weaknesses, as if they wanted
to hold your hand throughout the battle, this annoyed me a little bit.
There's more attacks and skills to learn in this game. In the last
game you could only learn 4 attacks, but this is has about 3 times as
much. If you want to switch your command buttons you have to hold down
on R and then scroll through them with the D-Pad. You still
automatically die if you fall in a hole, but you can walk off most of
the areas in this game, and the only time I ever fell in a hole was
with a flying character that was shot down or hit an object that made
them fall.
There's a nice auto function in the game that sets all your stats
for you after you level up. They only set for the characters you are
using, and not the reserve characters that gain levels with the
backwash Exp. There's also an Auto Equip function that sets your
characters best equipment when they find it. This was great until the
end where it kept removing items from one character and putting them on
another leaving the other character with no items at all, even when the
switch gave the other character worst DEF power. This annoyed me so
much that I had to remove the auto function.
The level design is still generic, and the puzzles within them are
equally generic. There's nothing new about the stages found in this
game, and overall I wish they would of put more time into the levels.
----------Characters / Story----------
Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen are trying to take over the world
once again. He has kidnaped Polaris and Magneto's son Quicksilver, so
Professor X and Magneto decided to work together to save follow mutants
and humans from total destruction.
Most of the X-Men from the last game reprise their roles in this
one, but only about half of them are playable. The playable characters
from the Brotherhood side of things is rather weak. The only ones I
ended up using was Juggernaut and Magneto. Why would I want to play as
Toad? Sabertooth isn't playable? What’s up with that? There's no
"introductory" character in this asking stupid questions, so that's
good.
You start off with all 15 of your characters but the 3 unlockable
ones. This gave me a hard time deciding who to use and what purpose
most of them had to do with the story. Only a few of them had lines.
----------Graphics----------
The characters are still cel-shaded, but they don't like look
paint blobs anymore, there's more detail to each character. The
pre-rendered cut scenes look amazing! There's only one cutscene per
Act, plus the ending scene, but my biggest motivation to beat this game
was to get to the next cutscene. In the last game they're blurry and
completely outdated, but in this one they're all sharp, beautiful and
kinda long compared to the last one.
The level design is still pretty weak. They even use some of the
old ideas of the last one, sewers, city, factory, etc. The levels are
longer, but it can get really tedious at times. There's barely any
progression from the first game with the levels.
There was a few bugs in the game that bothered me. If you try to
walk under stairs or walk near a wall and turn the camera swiftly, then
the camera would get stuck in one position for a while. Another one was
if you fly in the air and you'll get stuck and can't move. I had to
warp back to base and warp back because Magneto was stuck in the air
and wouldn't move or get out, he would just spin in circles.
----------Sound----------
All the voice actors are really good in this game, even better
than the last one. Alison Crestmere isn't in this game at all, thank
god. They changed Rogue's voice though, it's good, still southern but
not as thick. The music is a huge improvement and I actually enjoyed
some of the songs.
----------World Map----------
The game is split into 5 Acts, each act has it's own world map.
There's 7 save spots per Act, except for Act 5, which has 3. Each save
spot counts as a "dot" on the map. When you reach a save spot you can
"Extract" yourself to any dot you've already visited (another huge
improvement over the first game). So you can pretty much re-visit any
area in the game. You will also meet up with Blink, a mutant that can
transport you back to your base at any point within the game. So with
Blink, you can save at any time, and return to your last exact spot. In
each act, Professor X starts a new base near your main objective. For
example in the last game, your base was the X-Mansion, in this one you
have 5 bases.
Another improvement over the last game is the level map. In the
last one the whole map is displayed as you enter an area, but in this
one you have to map out each area, this helps for backtracking and
makes the game alot easier since the levels are bigger. Like the first
game, you have a choice if you want to view no map, a small map or a
large one. In this game it always starts you off with the small map
(which is all you need). In the last one it always started you off with
no map, which got really annoying.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through)----------
26:35
Slightly longer than the first game. After you beat the game you
will unlock a new character, and you can continue on playing the game
completing sidequests like the Danger Room and such.
