I finally started X-Men Legends this week. I originally picked it up back in October (on sale) the week before San Andreas came out. That probably ranks as my stupidest game purchase ever.
It's okay. It's pretty much the X-Men version of Diablo. Your team piles into a room and beats the piss out of whatever enemies are up ahead. The character powers are all handled well enough, if erring toward the dull side... but I'm still early in the game so I haven't unlocked anything earth-shattering. Maybe the Cyclops-tears-off-his-visor move is coming later.
There is a weird RPG element to the game, exactly like the spell skill trees of Diablo. Everybody gains experience and earns skill points, which you then use to add/boost powers. So you could make a Wolverine that concentrates on the healing factor over a damaging claw attack. Although realistically, my goal for the end of the game is to have Wolverine be awesome in all the powers... so me going through the motions of specifically assigning the skill points is a waste of time.
And the game designers are aware of this, because they tossed in an Auto button. So when Wolverine levels up, you can select Auto and then the game distributes his skill points for you. However, that still isn't automated enough for my liking, because you still have to Pause and enter the Character screen to even get to the Auto button. I'd rather the team just upgrade on their own.
The graphics are lousy. The detailing on the characters is fuzzy and poor, making any zoomed-in scenes egregiously ugly. And the FMV cutscenes? Absolutely grotesque. Every character looks like somebody's First Poser Image.
And who is the dope at Activision that thinks we want to watch developer splash screens as part of the collected Cinematics? From the main menu, you can review the game's cutscenes (why would you want to) as well as all the annoying dev team logo movies visible on bootup. Spider-Man 2 had the same conceit. Legends also thinks it's "fun" to collect Loading Screens; you can review those on one of the X-Mansion's many computer terminals. Ah, the Sentinels-artwork load screen! Boy, the things we loaded on that one.
But you know, it all ends up with me watching three other AI-controlled X-Men pound the crap out of somebody with fists and feet while I snipe with distance attacks from the other side of the room. That's really all I'm in this one for.
