Action with a unique blend of gaming elements.
X-Men: Legends put you at the helm of a slew of X-men with a top down isometric view. You take your heroes (4 at a time) into missions kicking, punching, and mutant-powering your way through waves of enemies. There's lots of generic anonymous baddies to beat up, and along they way you come across lots of evil mutant foes, and a fair share of sentinels as well. Amongst all the action you gain experience to level up your characters. During each mission you'll come across "Extraction Points" which allow you to save your progress, buy new equipment, and change team members.
What's good:
Lots of characters to pick from, and the favourites (at least my favourites) are all present.
Visuals. The X-Men and environments look really good during the game-play, as do the mutant-power-effects. For as good as they look, every once in a while you may find yourself in a battle where you lose who's who in the crowd of combatants.
The leveling up system. I don't like managing characters, and I'm not a fan of RPGs. This system however does a great job of combining lots of options yet making it simple and enjoyable for gamers like me to use. When leveling up you can change attributes like health, stamina, mutant powers equipment and more. As overwhelming as I thought it would be, it was very user friendly.
When you start the game, you do not have the entire library of characters at your disposal. New characters come into play as the story progresses. Another nice thing about the leveling up system is that new characters join your team they'll already leveled up enough to be formidable team mates with the X-Men you've already had a chance to build up. This is nice because you can get them into the game right away and have some fun, and not worry about them dying off. Additionally, the lesser used characters you tend to keep in the closet continue to level up as you complete missions. Again, this keeps a balanced team.
Friend and Foe AI. Although not perfect, and they do make their mistakes, your team mates usually do a good enough job at handling themselves in a fight. As for the enemy AI, they seem to be programmed not to gang up on some poor AI controlled team mate that isn't to sure how to defend themselves.
The Danger Room! Access to the Danger Room lets you practice and have skirmishes. Rack up experience or just cause some havoc! It's a very fun detour from the main missions, and the later "courses" become very challenging.
Flash back missions. Adding to the main story line you can play a couple of battles from the past in the glorious classic X-Men outfits. Very stylish.
What could've been better:
Having the Co-Op play is great, and having access to playing up to 4 X-Men at time is also great. It's not so great when the game starts you off with just 1 hero to play as. When I first got the game, I was all ready to jump into co-op play, only to find out I had to unlock a 2nd character first. It doesn't take that long, but was very odd. Luckily this draw back doesn't last for too long.
Sometimes your teammates crowd you, making it hard to maneuver, access switches or get through doorways.
Although you can play danger room fights (single or multi-player) with the unlocked characters after you've completed the game, the option to go back and replay the storyline from the beginning with all the characters and powers you've unlocked would have been nice.
For as much action as there is, occasionally you may find yourself in a rut of just repeating the same range attacked over and over again to get through the level. Lighting strike. Lightning strike. Lightning strike. Lightning strike.
In game dialog. The voice work itself is good, but the taunts and catch phrases get very repetitive.
Lots of fun and a decent length campaign, with the action and character management well balanced. I'd recommend this game to anyone who wants to have some excitement, and lay down some punishment; X-Men fan or not.
