X-Men Legends
Is the first X-Men RPG worthy of Legendary status?
Tags: X-Men Legends Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 12th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| X-Men Legends (title page) | 1 - 4 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Role-Playing (Action) | No | ||
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I love RPGs in general. I love the X-Men. So you’d think that an X-Men RPG would be a no-brainer home run with me, right?
And typically, it would be. Except when the game plays more like a coin-op RPG in the tradition of Gauntlet than a true, genuine console action RPG. The Gauntlet roots are so deep, so obvious in X-Men Legends that I had to keep checking the packaging to make sure XL was made by Activision and not Gauntlet publisher, Midway. Nope, the case still says Activision. Go figure.
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Of course, I’m a hardcore RPG guy, so the main reasons the Gauntlet-inspired gameplay annoys me is exactly what could make XL a runaway hit with a broad audience. In fact, the market timing for a really good X-Men RPG has never been more ideal; one year removed from X-Men 2, the largely-improved follow-up to the first X-Men movie, with that very film in heavy rotation on movie channels and available in deluxe edition on DVD, with nearly half of Marvel Comics’ publishing list consisting of X-Men or mutant-related titles, never have the X-Men been as popular with as wide an audience (outside of hardcore comic book fans). A decent X-Men game is as overdue today as a decent Spider-Man game was about five years ago when Activision finally gave us the first Spider-Man videogame that didn’t suck.
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To be fair to Capcom, there was a time in console and arcade gaming when fighting games were the top genre around; nothing was more American than baseball, apple pie and a fighting game on your NES or at the arcade. And since for a long time Capcom held the X-Men license, and all they did with it was fighting games, the X-Men franchise has never been used before in anything but fighting games. Until now, that is. Now, Activision has the license and – after a few obligatory fighting games of their own – the X-Men finally get to do something other than fight SNK and Street Fighter characters.
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X-Men Legends, the product of at least two years of intense development (maybe three years, depending on who you ask), has finally been unveiled, the product of developer Raven Software and Activision. Unfortunately, you can take the X-Men out of the arcade, but apparently it’s hard to take the arcade out of the X-Men. Because rather than a console-style action RPG on the order of a Star Ocean or a Zelda title, what has been delivered is a coin-op-style RPG more in the tradition of Gauntlet. That’s not all bad, though; it makes the game more open to co-operative play and quite a bit easier for the casual gamer to pick up and play without a huge investment of time. XL is built for speed in the sense of being able to start playing it out of the box with a minimum of fuss or preparation. It’s the kind of game college kids can pop in at their dorm room and start playing with a bunch of buddies without having to master a complex RPG battle system or sit through nearly a half-hour of intro movies before you can stop watching and start kicking butt.
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Yet for a hardcore RPG fan, the game is a bit shallow. While it’s unspeakably cool to play as all your favorite X-Men, from Wolverine to Cyclops to Jean Grey to whomever, once you play through you can’t help but think to yourself, “That’s it?” Sure, there are ability upgrades and special powers to acquire, but much of the game is just modernized, Marvel-ized Gauntlet game play of running around, breaking enemies and things and collecting goodies. It doesn’t bring the depth of story or game play that the whole “RPG” label usually brings to mind.
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Okay, enough griping about what X-Men Legends isn’t; here’s what’s great about what it is. Rather than being set in the classic X-Men universe with its nearly 40 years of continuity to unscramble, or being set in the “gotta negotiate everything with movie guys” X-Men movie universe, X-Men Legends is based on the trimmed-up, sleek Ultimate X-Men universe which is only about five years old and has already been scripted by such comic book luminaries as Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis, two of the best writers working in comic books today. The X-Men found in XL even got professional comic book help, since the game-script was worked on by Men Of Action, contracted by Raven Software and Activision for that purpose, a writers studio that, among others, includes comic pros like Steven T. Seagle, who had his own modestly-acclaimed run on the classic X-Men comic about five to seven years ago.
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As the game opens, you’re playing as Wolverine, attempting to rescue a teen mutant just coming into her powers who has been kidnapped by the Brotherhood of Mutants, a mutant terrorist group whose purpose in kidnapping the girl plays out over the course of the game. As in the movie franchise, the big bad behind the Brotherhood of Mutants is supreme mutant baddie Magneto, who is on yet another “take over the world” power trip.
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As you progress through the game, you’ll be joined by more and more X-Men; you can have up to four in your party at any one time and game play has been intelligently designed to reward intelligent inclusion of who you have in your party and who you don’t to accomplish certain tasks. For example, if your mission requires you to get through a steel wall, Cyclops’ optic blasts are probably a far easier solution than Wolverine’s claws or Storm’s, uhh … storms! So think each mission through, bud.
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Fortunately, there’s a lot of deep game play to be had here; while the coin-op-style game play may seem surface-level, the story is long and involved and lasts more than the couple hours it takes to master most fighting games. XL, in fact, can take anywhere from 20 to 30 hours to get through, quite a step up from shallow fighting games with no story. All the expected high-water marks are touched upon here; in addition to the Brotherhood, you get to encounter Sentinels and other classic X-Men villains as you attempt to unravel and stop Magneto’s plan.
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The battle system starts basic but gets more complex as you level up and add abilities. Once you have more than Wolverine in your party, you can pull off combos for extra damage, most of them taken straight from the comic book page, such as Wolverine and Colossus’ “Cannonball Express,” in which Colossus picks Wolvie up, tosses him really far and allows Wolvie to take an unsuspecting enemy by surprise with a vicious claw attack. The main problem tends to be managing healing in a one-player game; unless you set the AI just right, you’ll have to switch which character you control almost constantly, just to keep your party members from dying.
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One strong point of the game is its destructible environments; if it logically can be broken, you can probably break it in XL, as long as you’re obsessed enough to keep at it. It takes longer, for example, for Wolverine’s claws to shred a car than to shred a wooden park bench. Yet while it’s fun to break a bunch of crap in the game, it’s annoying that Raven Software went with the coin-op RPG cliché of “everything you break has items in it.” Now, I could see shredding a sofa and finding some money – but really, how many street lights contain healing packs and energy packs when you break them? This is an example of developers just sticking to the clichés of the genre, rather than really rethinking things and saying to themselves, “Does that concept work well in this particular game?”
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Graphically, Raven Software was inspired when they created the look of the game; rather than making it look like every other RPG out there, they stayed true to the comic book origins of the game and designed the whole look of the game so characters and objects have black outlines, the look of inking work taken from the look of comic books. The effect works well and helps to create the impression that you’re playing a comic book, rather than playing just any old videogame. The mission-based architecture works well within the concept of the X-Men team. And the inclusion of Patrick Stewart, the movie franchise’s Professor X, turns out to be a boon to the game as he contributes much-welcome voice work; the only downside is that it makes the other voice actors conspicuous by the fact that they are, in fact, NOT the movie stars who played Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Gray, Storm and so on in the movie franchise. Oh well.
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When it’s all said and done, while the coin-op game play is a major disappointment, X-Men Legends is far superior to any simplistic fighting game Activision could have commissioned instead; now, if only they can build on this and upgrade the game play to a far more complex, console action RPG-style game, more in the order of Star Ocean, Zelda and other console action RPGs, the X-Men RPG franchise could achieve greatness; however, if they stick with the simplistic coin-op/Gauntlet-style RPG game play, sequels will only further reveal the limitations of the Gauntlet-style battle system, rather than grow beyond them. And one thing that’s puzzling is, if the gameplay is this simplified for co-op play, where’s the online mode? At least online co-op play could add an extra element to make up for the skin-deep battle system.
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Here’s hoping Raven and Activision, reportedly already hard-at-work on X-Men Legends 2, pay attention, do the smart thing and add some much-needed complexity to the combat engine to bring it in line with other top console action RPG franchises; if they do, not only will the game sell well now – which it likely will – but it will continue to sell well down the line, when we’re reviewing X-Men Legends 10 for PlayStation 5, GameHexagon and ZZZBox.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Lots of genuine X-Men with great, accurate powers, well-realized within the game. + Based on the best version of the X-Universe, Ultimate X-Men. + Deeper, longer and far more engrossing than those stupid Capcom fighting games of old. |
7.1 |
| What Doesn't | |
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— Plays too much like a coin-op, Gauntlet-style RPG than a true console action RPG. — Unfortunate that more X-Men movie actors couldn’t be lured to do voicework here. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| For a first X-Men-based RPG, not bad … but not quite on the same level of top Square-Enix RPGs, either … yet. X-Men Legends does provide the building blocks for what could become a top action RPG franchise. | |
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Tags: X-Men Legends
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 12th, 2004 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.
