X-Men Legends 2
Game play as sharp as Wolverines claws? Gotta read to find out, bub!
Tags: X-Men Legends 2 Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 7th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| X-Men Legends 2 (title page) | 1-4 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Role-Playing (Action) | Yes | ||
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Typically, RPGs take a long, long time to develop. Even once the engine is built and the first game fills it out, it just takes a really long time to build each game, even if you only make minor tweaks to the game engine for the sequel. So when Activision announced X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse would be available almost a year to the day after the first was released, it was cause for concern. Would the game be a rush-to-market job? Would it have most of the same bugs as the previous title? Would it play more like X-Men Legends 1.5 instead of a full sequel? Happily, except in the minor details, none of those worst fears were realized.
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If anything, X-Men Legends II starts out better and more dramatically than its predecessor. Rather than starting out as Wolverine, playing solo, for the first couple chapters, the game sets up its premise right away; the opening cinema sets up the threat posed by Apocalypse that forces arch-foes the Brotherhood of Mutants and the X-Men to join forces against what may very well be an undefeatable opponent. Within minutes, you’re playing through a tutorial level with a party of four and leveling up characters, which if you choose to let a fairly smart AI system take over on, will automate the leveling task rather seemlessly, welcome news for action-oriented gamers who don’t want to muss with such things themselves. However, if you wish to take control of the leveling process, you still can – the auto-leveling is not mandatory, just an option.
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Apocalypse as a character stays true to the comic book vision of him; he’s about 5,000 years old, an Egyptian who may be the first-ever mutant born into the world; he desires to rule the world and lives by the Darwinian ethic of survival of the fittest, believing that all who are not mutants are worthy only of slaughter and even “weak” mutants deserve extinction. And basically, any mutant who doesn’t bow down to Apocalypse immediately is considered weak. Nice, huh? Even with such a considerable epic story to explore, however, the game is not without plenty of side-quests and smaller stories to tell. In fact, one of your first missions is a rescue task in which you must retrieve a mutant lost in a “dead zone” from the threats of that area and return her safely to the island of Genosha, a mutant safe haven created by Magneto that serves as the game’s home base of operations this time out.
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The basic game engine is similar to the first game, but with so many features now able to be optionally automated, the game plays faster and smoother if you take advantage of the automation features; if you level up, you just suddenly have these increased stats and often new abilities as well, that becoming immediately available. It’s cool as long as you’re not worried about controlling the leveling up process yourself; you can, if that kind of control is your thing, though. You can use up to four powers “loaded and ready” at any one time and the game does a good job from an automated perspective of keeping the most useful ones handy. It’s still quite simple to switch which X-Man you control – the simple press of a D-pad button – with the only caveat being that you need to remember to lay off the D-pad when trying to use powers, because you’ll end up switching X-Men instead.
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Combos enter the picture earlier this time, providing much-needed variety, and the wealth of playable characters (about 20, this time out) is more generous than before, though some only become available to you later in the game. One of the weak points is that you pretty much need to choose a favorite formation and stick with it early on in the game, because it can cause some real havoc if you add a Level 1 character to your foursome once the rest of your party is Level 10 or above. Of course, most RPGs suffer from this dilemma, so it’s not a bump in the road that is unusual only this title. The real downside is that some of the tastier Brotherhood or X-Men members don’t become available until you already have a pretty leveled-up party, which makes dumping Cyclops for some other X-Men midway through the game a bit less inviting.
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The biggest complaint one can level against the game is that it sticks to a fairly tight formula between boss battles; accept a mission, then go from room-to-room in that mission area killing and collecting everything you encounter; there’s not a ton of variety on the order of having more of an exploration element involved; it’s all just room-to-room search and destroy missions, basically. What changes is only what you’re trying to accomplish, be it rescuing someone, trying to get an object before someone else does, or whatnot. Still, the story line does its job to keep this formula from becoming too obvious by making each mission unique from a motive/objective point of view.
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Yet for any weaknesses it has in the “standard dungeon crawl” portions of the game, the boss battles make it worth your while. Even though each boss has a pattern that is the key to his or her defeat and can be figured out rather easily, the variety between bosses is actually quite good. In fact, the final showdown with Apocalypse is an extremely long, detailed struggle that really plays out well, presenting plenty of challenge no matter how leveled up you are at the outset. While it’s hard to compare X-Men Legends II directly with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I will say that the final battle with Apocalypse is as intense and lengthy an experience as I’ve had since the sniper-battle in MGS 3. If and when you finally prevail, there’s a true feeling of accomplishment and the only way the game could have been better is if it had prepared you more appropriately for the challenge by making some of the more mundane dungeon crawling segments a bit less of a cakewalk.
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Online mode comes along for the ride this time out, and while there is a versus segment, the game actually plays most naturally in online cooperative mode; considering the X-Men are a team, it only feels right to have up to four players individually controlling each X-Man, working together to play through the game. Things go faster that way and if you have broadband, I understand there’s very little lag, depending on network conditions. Nice touch.
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In the end, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse may not be a huge, quantum leap forward from the previous title, but the number of features the RavenSoft team has added and fixed, all while expanding the playable roster and creating a whole new storyline, getting it all to market in about a year, it certainly feels like a full, true sequel and not just a 1.5 release. While X-Men Legends II may, as some charge, essentially be a Gauntlet clone with Marvel characters, the upside of that argument is that it’s a pretty good one, and far more in-depth and involving than another silly fighting game. Activision has indicated that X-Men Legends II isn’t the end of its X-Men action-RPG series, and that the near future could bring other Marvel characters into the Legends fold. If that’s the case, I’d certainly welcome teams like The Ultimates (the Ultimate Marvel Universe take on The Avengers), Fantastic Four, the Defenders and even X-Men spin-off teams like Generation X, the New Mutants and others into the fold. Stan Lee’s old rallying cry applies: Make mine Mavel-Activision!
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ The story has more punch this time out, with Apocalyse as a villain. + Great voice work by Patrick Stewart. + Many of the previous bugs with leveling up, controls, executing moves and such are cleaned up this time out. + Automapping works well. + Some of the better boss battles you’ll encounter this side of Shadow of the Colossus. |
8.7 |
| What Doesn't | |
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— Although having the Brotherhood involved expands roster, having them on your team doesn’t affect game play. — Not enough variety in game play between bosses. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| In a great year for Marvel-inspired videogames, X-Men Legends II is the best of the bunch. | |
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Tags: X-Men Legends 2
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 7th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
