X-Men Legends 2 was an improvement over the first.
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.