Level Up: X-men Legends

Happy Canada listeners! Once again, I choose to take this occasion to talk about one of the greatest Canadian super heroes and his team: Wolverine and the X-men. Now, as with Spider-man, the X-men and a lot Mavel super heroes have had a fair bit of their 3D games published by Activision (I’ve already talked about X-men Mutant Academy 2). One of Activision’s most popular Marvel games has got to be Marvel Ultimate Alliance. But before I get to that one, I have to talk about the games that lead up it, like X-men Legends for the Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox (as I’ll be playing it).

It should be noted that this game is not a direct adaptation of a movie, cartoon or comic book plot. However, I find it has some similarities to the first movie. It starts off when the X-men learn of a mutant named Allison Crestmere (real identity of Magma of the New Mutants) who is being chased by members of the brotherhood. Some X-men stop them and take Allison to the Xavier institute so she can train her powers. Meanwhile Magneto makes a plan to basically kill all humans with a new device. Spoiler alarm, but the X-men unsurprisingly beat Magneto and Magma is able to use her powers with the machine to reverse the effects. Now, if you replace Magma with Rogue, you kind of summed up the first movie; the only big difference is that Magneto wanted Rogue to use his machine, while in the game, Magma using it would be the last thing he would have wanted.

Now of course, I’m painting with broad strokes here and there are still many differences. Mainly that this story keeps getting complex; goals change, you move around, new people are introduced, etc… A full analysis of the plot would take far too long. Furthermore, there are also subplots that develop, such as when Professor X is attacked by the Shadow King. It gives us more variety in a very well done way.

According to online articles, the original intent for the game play was to make an “X-men RPG” in a similar manner to Final Fantasy games: you would pick a team of X-men, go out on missions, level up, equip items and all that good typical RPG stuff. However, along the lines they drew inspiration from action RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance where the battle system is comparable to beat-em-ups. This is great, because as anyone who’s played the X-men arcade game could tell you, the X-men are perfect in the beat-em-up style. What we end up with is an RPG with a beat-em-up battle system where you can control 4 characters.  I think that last element is what really cements the game play as noteworthy, as it allows you to change your battle strategy on the fly. Sure the other 3 X-men are always there (working on AI), but sometimes you need to grab the reigns since the AI can be a little dumb.

To go deeper into battle system, you can jump, use heavy attacks or light attacks together to make some destructive combos. As for mutant powers, each character has a variety of abilities and you choose up to 4 attacks to be made accessible by holding R and pressing one of the main buttons. This is a pretty good battle system… but I feel the game as whole lacks a little polish. It’s not just the dumb AI, I also found myself very reliant on money; I kept needing to buy potions as, even enemies I could easily beat, would do heavy damage if they contacted me. (Also the potions didn’t heal for much.) Another reason why money is essential is because it costs to revive partners. Unless you fork up the cash, you can NEVER play as an X-man that got K.O.’d again. This is evened out by the fact that everyone still gains XP, but what am I even paying for, their medical bills?

X-men Legends is an ok start to a good series, but you really get the feeling that it’s not quite there yet. Maybe I was spoiled by playing Ultimate Alliance first, but I think its problems might still get to me. Still, the overall battle system  and the layout for the game make it worth investing time in, even though I know it’s not the first game to do something similar. The graphics are nice with cell shaded characters that look straight out of comic books yet clearly differentiated from the backgrounds, the music and voice acting are superb (Patrick Stewart does his Professor X for this game) and the story just screams “X-men”. There is also no lack of things to do in this game even beyond the main storyline (which is impressive, because that on its own is already HUGE). This game was really good, but more importantly it had potential, and luckily people saw that. I give X-men Legends 8 levels out of 10.