Legendary

"Can't see this one becoming a legend down the line."

Legendary was a game I saw on the PC and figured it was a run-of-the-mill FPS with some cool enemy concepts behind it. Then I saw an XBox 360 port sitting on the shelf at Blockbuster collecting dust, and I figured it was worth a go-around. The clerk warned me that it wasn't very good, but I reserved judgment until I got my hands on the gameplay. And, let's be honest here, it's disappointing. The controls are, for the most part, responsive and cooperative, but I do have a couple major issues with how this game plays:

1) Every so often, you come across a door that requires a fuse box to fix before progressing. A puzzle to the effect of what you'd find in Bioshock would suffice here and make for an amusing distraction. Instead, all you have to do is hold down the X button for five seconds, and it really breaks the flow of the action. Imagine you're playing any given game and you are arbitrarily forced to stop for a few seconds before you're allowed to continue. There's no time crisis to get these fuse boxes hacked, so there's no reason why this has to be.

2) The weapon power is very inconsistent. I started off unloading a full clip into one of the lava monsters, and when I started using the fire axe to get the achievement, it only took 1-2 hacks to kill it. A pistol should be more effective against a ball of molten rock than an axe. Hell, these aren't Derringers we're shooting with here!

The graphics are pretty decent and present the chaos going on very effectively, but you can't help but think that the character models are pretty bland. There's a story involving the evil guy who duped you into opening Pandora's Box and now wants you dead, but who cares? I mean, seriously, YOU OPEN PANDORA'S BOX. Do you need any more plot than that? I can't even remember the playable character's name because I can't bring myself to care about the squabbles between the humans. If you're going to essentially give us a straight-up shooter, then just give us some mythological creatures to fight and leave it at that. Some may liken this game to a nostalgic feel of older FPS games, but Doom had a skeletal plot and we still play that to this day. I just feel that, again, the plot breaks away from the action, which should have been the main attraction. The bosses don't pose much of a challenge either. In fact, the only time the Golem posed a threat to me is when I needed in to for the achievement points.

Overall, this isn't necessarily a bad game. It plays well enough, looks good enough and won't disappoint as budget PC ports go. But you can't go into this one expecting a mind-blowing experience because you'll end up thinking that you've played this game a million times in the last ten years, with many elements done better elsewhere too. I'm not a big fan these days of assigning numerical scores to reviews, but the overall 5/10 sums up the opinion perfectly: It's playable, but there's nothing special about it. If you want to try it out, definitely rent it first - spending even $30 on a blind purchase may lead to disappoint.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/30/09

Game Release: Legendary (US, 11/04/08)