X-Men: Legends

The story was ok, the battle system was pretty fun, although a bit to much button mashing. The only problems I had with the game was the weak dialog they gave Magma, the cheap level design, stupid AI, and dying from falling off of cliffs. Otherwise this was a pretty good game.


----------Battle System----------
X-Men Legends is an action / RPG with a top down view and a PC dungeon crawler feel to it. All the battles are in real time, and the enemies are always visible and don't randomly generate before your eyes, unless it's part of a warp machine. You can only have 4 characters in a battle at a time, and there's overall 15 playable characters in the game. There's one instance where a non-playable character will join your team though.

You team gains experience after each kill, even your reserve characters will gain a percentage of that experience aswell. Once you level up you have to distribute each stat point given to you, for the most part you'll get 1 stat point to boost your Power, HP, EP or Magic Power. You also get 1 stat point to boost your unique abilities. After each level divisible of 5 (10, 15, 20, etc), you'll get 2 stat points for both your stats and abilities. They cap your levels at 45, so you can't max out all your stats if you want to, this is rather stupid if you ask me.

Each character will have a set amount of abilities they can learn through out the game. Four of these abilities are magic attacks or magic boosters you can use during battle, while the rest are status boosters that are very helpful to strengthen your characters early in the game. You can't gain your 4th magic attack until you reach your 15th level, once you complete that you will gain an "Xtreme Meter" on your screen. If you can find 4 X-coins from killing enemies or finding them in boxes you'll gain 1 Xtreme Point, you can gain up to 5. These Xtreme attacks are very strong and can attack just about everything on your screen.

You can equip 3 sets of items, a backpack, belt and vest. The backpack will boost your abilities, the belt will boost your stats and the vest will give you resistence points. There's only one unqiue item per-character.

To save the game, you have to find special X marks on the ground called an X-traction Point. These's X-traction Points can change your party, it also can take you to the Danger Room to level up, Forge's shop to buy equipment, or Healer's shop to buy healing items.
Each stage will have a few puzzles, mostly lever switching. The few interesting ones is where Cyclopes had to weld doors or walls shut with his visor, and Jean Grey had to move levers (ugh) with her psychic powers. If you're looking for interesting puzzles, this is not the game for you. On each level you can find secrets like Danger Room discs, Comic Books (they boost your stats a bit), sketches, and stat points. When you visit the Mansion, you can view all the comic books covers you found, all the sketches, cutscenes and bios of enemies and X-Men.

If you fall off of a ledge your character instantly dies. To revive your character you have to find an X-traction Point and pay money to revive them. Who are you paying? This isn't explained. Your team AI is not very smart at all. They will fall off of a walkway or run through fire. Sometimes they will just stop fighting all together, or won't heal themselves when they're running low. The most annoying thing about the AI is when they stop infront of a doorway or trap you in a corner forcing you to change characters to progress.



----------Characters / Story----------
Well, it's the X-Men, I've loved the X-men since the early or mid 90s, so there's no complaint about most of the characters. I wish they would of gave Sabertooth a bigger role in the game. I'm glad Blob and Pyro made the game. I thought Magma was a character created just for the game until I did a little research. She's the only character I didn't like, mostly because they use her as an "introductory" character. She asks all the questions we already know, and she likes to repeat them again and again. She sounds naive and mildly stupid. I just can't stand her character, and the awful dialog they gave her. This game was made for X-Men fans, I figure they'll know who Magneto is! I really hope they don't throw in another intro character like this in the next X-Men Legends game, it's really annoying.



----------Graphics----------
The characters are cel-shaded, they look alright when you're fighting on a stage, but upclose during a dialog cutscene they look like a big blob of color thrown together with MS Paint. The stages and everything else is made of CGI, only the characters are cel-shaded. Even the action cutscenes are CGI. These cutscenes looks very outdated, almost Starcraft quality. The scenes are a bit grainy, but they cut away with quick shots so you can't hardly notice the detail, but when they do give you a long shot, it looks really bad.

The stages are pretty generic, but you can break just about anything on the stage, and strong characters like Colossus or Rogue can lift up Cars and throw them, which is cool. The special attacks are minimal, but they should be in an action game like this.

They like to repeat the same stage over again at times. You'll go through the Sewers like 3 times, and the Astral Plain about 3 or 4 times, NYC about 2 times. They'll be different each time, but it still makes the game feel cheap and thrown together.



----------Sound----------
Every character is voiced out, the only time you have to really read text is when the character you are controlling has dialog within a stage. Since it would probably tax the game a bit getting all 15 characters to voice out the same dialog or unique dialog for each stage I can understand why they did this. The only problem I have with this is the level dialog that your character says is super generic stuff. I played as Wolverine most of the time, and when he had a conversation on the stage, it's mostly stuff he would never say.

Most of the voice actors are pretty good. They even got Patrick Stewart to reprise his role as Professor X. There's some more familiar voices in the game like Lou Diamond Phillips as Forge, Ed Asner as Healer, and John Dimaggio (Bender of Futurama) as Juggernaut. The only one that really bothers me is Cree Summer as Allison / Magma, it's not all her fault, but it's mostly because the last thing I remember her from is Foxxy Brown of Drawn Together, and those characters are complete polar opposites. The other problem is the lame dialog they gave her for the game. Magma is easily the lamest X-Men in the game, and you HAVE to play as her for half of it.

The music is minimal, and really repetitive. When you get thrown into a battle, the music will get louder and pump up. None of the tracks are good and you'll be hearing the same stuff over and over again. When your character levels up they'll say something, and when they need life they'll let you know. The enemies will yell at you as well, Avalanche is the most annoying of them all. Just about every human solider you fight has about 3 lines all together, this gets old within the first stage, yet you'll be forced to hear the same lines over and over again until you finally beat it.



----------World Map----------
There's no world map within the game. The game moves in a linear fashion where they start you off in one area, then they move you to the X-Mansion, then when you're ready to move on to the next level you find the War Room and start the next mission. Sometimes there's multiple missions and you get to pick which one you want to start, but you'll have to go through them all in a row before you can rest up at the X-mansion again. There's no way you can revisit old levels in the game either.

The X-Mansion is the only safe haven in the game, although you do fight a couple levels on it. There's 3 stories on the X-Mansion and sometimes you can walk outside in the front and back yard. There's a ton of people inside and outside of the mansion, but you can't talk to anyone unless they have an exclamation point above their head.



----------Time to Complete Game (first run through)----------
22:59

You save the game after the credits and it unlocks new uniforms for you to play with if you want to restart the game. That's the only bonus for beating it. If you die fighting the last boss, then you can see an alternate ending.