X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

"A Brutally Long and Unbalanced Hack & Slash"

Ah, X-Men Legends 2. A highly anticipated game, mostly in part due to the huge fan base of the comics/tv series/movies. I played through the first game, and rather enjoyed it until the end of the game, and before playing this one I said "Ok, surely they'll have done SOME things better.". Little did I know of the rocky road ahead of me.

(note: this review is based on both the Gamecube and PC versions of the game)

Graphics (7/10):
The graphics are quite good. In particular, the movies are done well. They actually look like the actors from the recent movies, and it adds to the game. On the other hand, most attack graphics are surprisingly bland. A few attacks really let me down, such as Dark Phoenix. Also, every area is somewhat different looking, which is a GREAT improvement over the first game in which half the game is the same sewers.

On a side note, the game uses cell-shading, which some people rabidly dislike. I myself don't care.

Sound (4/10):
Ouch. The sound in the game consists of the same sound effects, over and over again... The worst is the voice acting. There's only so many times a person can stand hearing Toad say "I 'aven't got enough bloody energy to do that!". Every other sound effect is unremarkable and/or stock.

Music (3/10):
I don't even remember the music in the game, and that's a bad thing. In fact, I think at one point I turned the music off because I got tired of listening to the same loop while searching a gigantic area. I would not suggest listening to either the sound or the music in this game while playing; if anything it takes away from the experience.

Control (7/10):
The controls are acceptable, but somewhat unintuitive and annoying at times. I do like the system for changing your equipped abilities in battle, but the setup menu can be annoying... if you accidentally press Y, it'll automatically give the selected hero "suggested" skills and stat points. By "suggested" I mean it'll spread the points out evenly and unintelligently. You have to then go and remove every point before exiting the setup or they'll be permanent. Another nuisance is the Call Allies command, which tells your allies to either move toward you, or use a set ability, which should be very handy for casting support abilities. Note the word SHOULD. Computer allies like to ignore your commands unless you hammer on the key, and never cast outside battle, even if you'd like them to.

Gameplay (2/10):
This is where the game really takes a hit. I'd give it a 1 if it wasn't fun beating up on helpless enemies.

The skills are almost all copies of one other, and most of them are blatantly amazing or awful. It was nice of them to give you so many people to choose from, but the point is somewhat defeated (gameplay-wise) when half of the characters are identical (or nearly identical) to another.

The gameplay at it's core is running around senselessly beating up random enemies, and solving puzzles. But this game's "puzzles" are laughably easy. Most of them are simple fetch-quests (go here, get 3 items, bring them back, etc.). Simple, and boring, and unnecessarily long. The end of the game is especially bad about this. Any of the non-fetch puzzles involve using a flyer to cross a pit (challenging!) or using a skill on a stationary object. You can do every puzzle in the game with a team of 2 people: Jean Grey and Bishop. I was very disappointed that they removed the ability and necessity to weld things, from the first game.

One very large flaw of this game is the huge amount of time required to be spent on it. Some might say this is a good thing, and I'd agree if there was actual content being experienced during this time. But most of the game is spent exploring gigantic areas, with little or no storyline involved for hours at a time, mindlessly defeating the same 2 or 3 types of enemies in that area. If you've played Diablo 2, it's like that only much more time consuming and repetitive, with much less strategy needed.

Difficulty and Balance (1/10):
I'll be blunt, X-Men Legends 2 was NOT balanced. A small number of skills are incredibly overpowered, allowing you to smash your way through the entire game using one skill on each of your four players. For example, Nightcrawler's Divine Blades have about 3x the power:cost ratio of any other starting skill, and rip bosses and enemies alike to shreds. Meanwhile, Toad's Secretion support spell massively increases both the team's Damage and Attack Speed, on attacks and spells alike. Suddenly, a well placed Master of Chaos attack, supported by Secretion, can kill or critically injure any boss in the game.

Amazingly, the difficulty gets LOWER as the game goes on. Players have access to a large variety of diablo-esque equipment, mostly with useless effects. However, some add directly to attack damage. This would be fine, but bonuses from abilities like Secretion apply AFTER the bonus damage is added. Making things worse is the attack speed of some weapons. Placing attack bonuses on a computer Bishop, set to use a rapid-fire gun attack, allowed me to kill off a number of bosses before they appeared on the screen.

Hard-mode was no better. In fact, Hard-mode was much easier, thanks to having high level skills off the bat. Also note that by no means did I find the game easy because I overleveled. I never stopped to level, teleported my way through regions to reach bosses quickly, and ended up skipping every optional quest in hard mode. I collected extremely few items, and just assigned what had the highest damage bonus. I never had a character killed (a few were stupid enough to jump over a cliff though), and the final boss didn't even hit me.

X-Men Legends 2 is pitifully easy if spend a few minutes looking at skills to figure out which is inherently ridiculous. There is no skill required, no strategy required. Most bosses should die in under 10 seconds. Those who don't, are temporarily invincible due to something nearby. This would make things slightly more difficult if your task wasn't painfully obvious, and if the bosses didn't TELL YOU what to do. "You fools, keep that teleporter beam away from me," indeed.

Replay (1/10):
The only reasons I give this game ANY replay value is because:
a)You can restart the game using all your items and experience from the first playthrough

b)You might want to go through the entire game with a single hero to make it a challenge the second time through.

c)There are some pitiful sidequests in the form of item-collecting, and the Dangerroom, which gives you obnoxiously easy, or impossible, tasks.

Those are weak reasons though, and certainly aren't enough to get me to play it again.

Other:
This game lies to you, constantly, and has an enormous quantity of useless items and stats.
Firstly, it suggests that the stat Speed increases your chance to hit and chance to dodge in melee. I never put a single point into Speed, yet I never missed a melee attack, making it useless. I'm not sure if it affects dodging, because I killed every enemy I ever came across in 1-2 hits. The game states that the stats Body increases resistances, but 250 points of it didn't increase resistance one point. Not that this matters, since resistance is utterly utterly pointless when you shouldn't be hit. Secretion claims to increase movement speed, but increases attack speed. Iceman has a support ability that increases the stat Attack by 1 (a point of speed increases it by 5). This is only a small sampling of the errors in the game.

There are a giant host of items boasting effects such as increased resistance, incredibly small amounts of HP and Energy stolen from kills, and worst of all, bonus to the Speed stat. It reaches the point where picking up items is a mere waste of your time.

Overall (4/10):
Good for passing time, fans of the series will enjoy it... but it is by NO means a good game in and of itself. Unbalanced, ridiculously easy, and tedious to the point of boredom.

Rent or Buy:
Renting is too short to play through the whole game and actually get all the secrets, and buying it is painful because once you've beaten it once there's really no reason to do so again. If you want to play the game, rent it. But be prepared to re-rent at least once unless you rush through.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/05