Power Rangers: Super Legends

"Does fans a disservice, but provides decent platforming"

Power Rangers: Super Legends Review

As my XBOX 360 is currently in for its second repair so that hopefully its ‘disc read error' message and disc scratching will be history by the time that Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, I decided to break out the old Playstation 2 and play something. Bored with my games, I decided to borrow my brother's copy of Power Rangers that I bought him for Christmas. Figuring it could kill a little time, I played it over the course of two days. Here are the results of those two days:

Overview: Power Rangers: Super Legends is a side-scrolling action platformer featuring the characters from some of the many incarnations of the brightly clad teenagers. Using one or two players, characters from the shows fight to stop Lord Zedd and various enemies from the show from spreading their evil throughout the time continuum. The Rangers are notified of this danger by the future Omega Ranger, the Power Ranger historian. The Omega Ranger claims that tapping more than 2 Rangers at a time would ‘disrupt the time stream too much'. Sounds more like they didn't want to bother to make it 4 or 5 players to actually accommodate a full team of Rangers.

Story: The story is pretty much what I said in the overview, and nothing more. Each level, pull in a couple more Rangers to help fix the timeline, and fight through waves of repetitive enemies to fight a small number of lame bosses. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Story score: 2/10

Graphics/Visual Presentation: Actually, the graphics are the strong point of the game, though they don't blow you out of the water. The cell shading makes the bright colors look as they should, and gives it kind of a cartoonish or comic book look. Level design looks good, although there are a few too many generic factory or warehouse type areas for as few levels as there are. The Ninja-style, city rooftop, and SPD exterior levels are reminiscent of the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade games. Fire and blaster effects look good. There aren't a great number of move animations, but they look good. There are two disappointing areas visually however. First is the size of the Rangers and monsters; they are tiny, with a couple of the larger enemies being an exception. This makes it easier to platform jump (think Mega Man in the earlier NES games), but looks kind of embarrassing. Secondly, the cutscenes are pathetic, on par with South Park's intentionally bad style. Thankfully, you'll be in the action most of the time, and won't have to worry about these much.

Graphics/Visual Presentation score: 7/10

Sound: The sound in the game is decent, but unremarkable. The music is, again, similar to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game. It resembles the Power Rangers music, but probably doesn't actually come from the show. Sound effects are good, but like the animations, variety is extremely limited. Enemy chatter is lame and repetitive, and since you'll only be fighting about 8-10 distinctly different enemy minions, this can get old (some enemies have different appearances, but they have the exact same moves as other bad guys). Rangers do often say something aloud when a hidden item is nearby, which is useful. It's hard to actually tell one Ranger's voice from another, except for male versus female ones.

Sound score: 5/10

Gameplay: Gameplay is divided between two segments, the action/platforming segments, and occasional end-of-level boss battles. The action involves a punch/kick button, a blaster button, a throw button, a jump button, and a special move. Combos mixing the first four buttons provide the lion's share of the fighting, with some useful ground pounds and uppercuts mixed in. Using different buttons in a combo builds up a number of stars, increasing the experience gained when an enemy is defeated. Experience gained is used to level up maximum health, damage, and special move charge rate at the end of a level. The special move is a screen clearing attack if you press the special button again in a certain area on screen, which is useful when facing a mob of enemies. Unfortunately, for most Rangers this move charges so slowly (by performing attacks or certain pickups rather than over time like most games involving mana/energy attacks) you might only use it a couple of times per level. During the boss battles, certain turns are taken, each of which requires different context-sensitive button presses. One involves button mashing one of the face buttons, another involves quickly rotating the left analog stick counterclockwise, and the others involve pressing a few of the face buttons as the appear on-screen. It is intended to be a duel style, but unfortunately, the computer opponent is a push-over to an experience gamer such as myself. This may provide a small challenge for a younger gamer, but that's about it.

Gameplay score: 6/10

Replayability: The game is very easy to complete, only taking a few hours if you play it straight through. The primary sources of replayability are 1) the ability to replay any level you've completed, 2) leveling up characters, 3) unlocking new characters, and 4) collecting timeline collectables to unlock concept art. The ability to replay any level is nice, and something that I wish all games would include. You can replay them and try to improve your best combos, enemy kill counts, and items collected. The best part of replaying the levels is, you can gain experience with any character, whether they've completed that level before or not. Again, that's something I'd like all RPG-style games would do.

Levelling up consists of collecting experience, either from defeating enemies or collecting experience orb pickups. Each character has a predefined maximum (up to 10 points, in some cases) level of health, damage, and special meter charge rate. Unfortunately, these maximums seem to be irrelevant to how much power they may have possessed in their tv series.

Characters are unlocked by finding 6 particular pickups in each level, each of which is one of the letters in the word RANGER. They are found in order across the level, which makes it somewhat easier to track down a missing one, unlike in other games with hidden items. For example, if you've found ‘A', you've already passed the first ‘R.' Unfortunately, if you've missed certain ones that you can't go back to, it will require you to replay the level again to get them all again, forcing more gameplay. Should you collect all six, a new Ranger will be unlocked upon completion of the level. Between finishing all levels, and finding all RANGER letters, a total of 20 Rangers can be available.

Timeline collectables are pickups which are in each level (10 in each), which will provide a concept art sketch if all 10 are collected in one playthrough of that level. Some levels it is easy to find all ten, whereas others it can be painful to locate them or make an extremely trick jump to gain access to them. Further more, most of the rewarded art just shows part of the level you've just played through, so you've basically already seen it. Also, you only get one sketch per level, so it hardly seems worth the effort. It seems more like an attempt at forcing replayability.

All in all, you might play through each level a few times, unlock all the Rangers, and max out some of the better ones, or your favorites. It only took me 2 days to this, without using any kind of guide, so it's definitely doable, and doable quickly. Then you'll probably leave this game alone for months, and pick it up for another few hours.

Replayability score: 5/10

Final Thoughts: To this point, I have reviewed the game solely as a video game. However, with this game, as all other licensed games, you must also compare it to the source material and see if it does what it can to please the fans. While these considerations do not affect my review scores of it purely as a game, they should be mentioned. The most disappointing thing about this game is that it doesn't include the entire pantheon of Power Rangers. Dino Thunder, Mystic Force, and other Power Rangers series are completely absent from the game. The most popular and reoccurring Power Ranger (Tommy) is absent. Although I can't claim to be a fan of the show, even I was surprised when I learned that he wasn't in the game. In addition, the individual Power Rangers aren't referred to by their human names, just their colors or codenames. Further, they have no backstory or history whatsoever which distinquishes them from one another. Also missing are any staffs, swords, axes, or specialty weapons, making this game even more generic than even the old TMNT games (at least that had bos, sais, nunchucks, and swords). They honestly couldn't make more than one move set to accommodate these weapons? What's up with that? Power Rangers is one of the few franchises that has the potential to be better in a video game than on tv, but fails to be more than a slightly attractive looking generic children's game.


Review:
Story: 2/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 5/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Replayability: 5/10

Final Verdict: 5/10
Rent/Buy: Rent (or buy when it's under $10)

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/11/08

Game Release: Power Rangers: Super Legends (US, 11/06/07)