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Mutants are always welcome at Buttonhole
Publisher: Activision
Thu, 3 November 2005
by: Australian Ninja
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I may not be the best there is at what I do, but when it comes to quality comic-book based video-games I am someone to listen to as I know what I'm blabbing on about, most of the time. X-Men Legends 2 is a great game. It's not a clunker like Fantastic Four, that game sucked. X2 is solid fun. In fact it is one of the BEST uses of the X-Men license in a game by far. Read on if you dare.
Like mashing buttons? I hope you do because there's a lot of it in X2. There is ample opportunity to run around dungeon bashing until your thumb screams for mercy. Basically X2 allows you to control a team of four mutants and explore large dungeon type areas. You take control of the lead mutant and the others follow. You can switch to any of the four characters at any time using the "+" directional controller. Also you can turn on/off one-to-four players at any time by accessing the in-game options. A smart move that makes it easy for a friend to join in casually and then leaves again at their leisure.
 | | Lots of stuff going on here (yeah okay, I'm too tired to think of a funny caption) |
A big surprise to me is that, wait for it...the computer-controlled teammates are nothing short of brilliant. They'll beat the hell out of the enemy and never once during play did they get stuck on a corner or left behind. I'm pretty sure there is some kind of auto-catch-up game mechanic here as AI in video-games is still very primitive.
During the game, you get armour etc to equip and your stats go up as you increase your characters level, ever played an RPG with stats? Then you know what I mean.
In X-Men Legends 2 there is a heap of characters to choose from, around fifteen of them. So when you finish it there is the possibility of playing again with totally different characters but still the same gameplay. It's an incentive at least and I'd rather have too many characters than not enough. Don't expect to use everyone during your first play, more characters are available as the story progresses and trying to use everyone means they will be too weak to keep playing. It would take forever to get everyone levelled up, better to pick your team and get them strong so you can progress.
*It's really easy in todays games to gloss over the fact that just about every game that comes out looks good. I know I take it for granted when I see just how pretty games have gotten in recent years and routinely fail to pay attention to how nice even the lesser games look. Well, X2 looks fan-bloody-tastistic. The character models are spot on. Wolverine is short with a wide body. Juggernaut is massive and suitably chunky. Jean Grey is slim, tall and sexy [Marry me Jean baby, Cyclops is a dick and you know it.] Often games don't even bother with proper proportions on human figures. Fortunately this one does. About my only complaint is that the females are interchangeable, same body different heads like a Barbie doll. Whereas the male characters are more defined and unique. I mean you KNOW who each character is as soon as you look at them, there's no mistaking that. The whole game is cell-shaded as far as I can see.
The camera in game does a fair job but I would've liked more freedom to move it around and see the characters up close. You can do this but sometimes it won't let you. The game auto scales out to the furthest view to accommodate the enemies and environment. Fortunately the view overall is fine for playing the game, it's just an aesthetic thing for me, you miss out somewhat on appreciating how nice the character models look.
The game is very repetitive; you enter the dungeon, bash enemies and pick up items. A boss fight now and then, objectives are added on the fly that involves either flipping a switch or blowing something up (by punching it). It's basic and it works. I thought I would get bored of it but I didn't. Halfway through the game I was still having a ball and not bored at all. If the game did not have the X-men theme however and instead had Bobby Generic, super-hero extraordinare then I doubt I would have played past the first map.
The voice acting is good. Not brilliant just good. Okay, Patrick Stewart as old Charlie Xavier is great. The rest are "in character" and actually impressed me. There is something so cool about bashing heads with Juggernaut, I mean just wiping the floor with enemies and after beating them he yells "You shouldnt'a messed with the Juggernaut!" Or "Where's my next victim!"
In contrast Magneto yells out "You don't seem to know who I am" in battle. But I thought he was saying, "I don't know who I am" which resulted in much hilarity. It was a good laugh and I like a good laugh especially when it's the unintentional kind.
At times the cut scenes are tedious as the voices are good, but the delivery can be dreary and monotone. Good thing you don't have to watch the mission briefs... ever. You can just not even go to the computer that shows them. When you start the mission you have a list of objectives and people always talk to you on the fly anyway. I'm just bashing everything in sight and Forge or Xavier yell out "Go to x location and destroy the generator" So I do that then he says something else. And the main objective for the mission is always available in the menu screen. It all flows along nicely.
During the game there are "Extraction Points." Not stat points, but a physical location / marker. The big blue "X" with a circle around it allows you to save, swap team members or fly back to home base. In addition, you can use "Blink Portal" anytime (except during and immediately before boss fights) to warp back to home base. These are great features. For example, you inventory is full of health and armour items, instead of throwing out old stuff to make room for the new junk you open a portal. Port back to base and sell the junk you don't want. Or save the game if you have not found an extraction point for a while. I can't stress enough how useful these two features are as they save so much time that would otherwise be spent backtracking manually to a save point or the "shop" at home base.
The boss fights are pretty ordinary but at the same time there is some good variety both in who you fight and how you fight them. Fighting Abyss meant first using melee attacks while he messed with the gravity in the room. Then he escapes onto a zeppelin. You [standing on Zeppelin One] throw barrels / blocks etc at Abyss on Zeppelin Two. Then he absorbs all of your team into an alternate dimension. You must throw some switches and eventually blow him up from inside himself. Okay. Weird fight, but then I've done the absorbing bit in other games so it wasn't that weird.
Long story short, it was FUN. It was different and a nice mix from just pummelling guys in other boss fights.
The costumes for the X-characters both good guys and bad guys are mostly taken from the Ultimate X-men Comic-book designs. This is good as the re-designed characters look smart 'n sassy in this game. But hey, if you don't like that nearly every character has an alternate "classic" costume. Want Wolverine in the familiar blue and yellow costume? Go ahead. Or Rogue in her yellow and green costume with a trench coat? Knock-yourself out. Or Scarlet Witch in some hot pants - you know you do - don't let me stop you. [Scarlet Witch is part of Magneto's team; The Brotherhood of Evil] You can switch characters and costumes whenever you want at any X-traction point. I changed them for variety, switching my characters costumes every new map or so just for fun.
Having bad guys and good guys to choose is just plain cool. I mean who doesn't want the option to choose Magneto or Juggernaut? If a third were made, it would be good to play as a total villain team with an alternate story out to stop the X-Men rather than villains who co-operate with the X-Men. But I digress; including Magneto as a playable character is seriously fun.
There is only a few FMV's in the game, but what there is is pretty damn sweet. The opening FMV sees Magneto, Sabretooth and Mystique infiltrating a military looking compound. Walking down a long corridor Magneto seizes the soldiers with his magnetic powers. They rendezvous with the X-Men. A big steel door explodes and Wolverine comes hurtling through, he slices off the end of a rifle then ruthlessly slaughters two more guards with some lightning fast snikety-snikt action.
Great stuff that pads out the mostly fluff story.
Apocalypse is the major big bad in X2. He's apparently got a clone army [why does that sound familiar...] and Mr Sinister on his side. He's gonna do some uh, bad stuff I guess. I'm not sure what, it involves finding mutants with "Harmonic" DNA - whatever the heck that is - and being evil. It also involves blowing up a very popular super-hero infested city then taking it over and some other bits with a nuclear power plant but honestly I lost track of it all long ago. I'm just a simple man who likes to bash heads with the Juggernaut. And that's just what I did. I used Juggy as my lead character through most of the game, I gave him all the stat upgrades and got him ridiculously powerful so I could just plow through the boss fights like an unstoppable force of nature. So don't think a weak story lets the game down, it's so inconsequential to the core gameplay you will hardly notice.
In between missions and any time you feel like teleporting there, the home base waits for you. Feel like stopping by the Danger Room for some training? Well too bad, you need to play some main missions first to find the "disc" that lets you load that particular program. When you do, you'll get bonus items and experience for completing the Danger Room tasks. It's a nice breather from the main game and free experience is always good. Once you're done there head on down to the trivia computer. Yes, trivia. Each act/chapter in the story [five total] showcases a different home base. With different trivia questions and Danger Room programs to play. The trivia was quite fun. The first one I breezed through. Even the questions about characters I was unfamiliar with I got right with an educated guess. But the next rounds got harder, I only got about seventy-five percent of the questions right. The important thing was that I found the trivia mini-game entirely by accident while looking for someone to talk to in the home base. It was a pleasant surprise and somewhat engrossing to see how much I really knew about the X-Comics. The questions have multiple choice answers and all the answers seem plausible with valid names etc. No joke answers at all so you really have to work for the correct answer. No button mashers need apply.
The variety of questions really impressed me from "Colossus first appeared in which comic?" to "What is The Guardians wife's name?" And "Sugar Man originally appeared in what 1990s storyline?"
 | | Wolverine doesn't like Cyclops and I don't blame him. |
Surprisingly I had a lot of fun answering these questions. It shows that somebody cares when a game is solid fun, no bugs or glitches that I am aware of, some nice voice acting including Patrick Stewart [legend] and then we get bonus danger room and trivia games. I haven't even mentioned the galleries of CG art and comic-book covers yet. You can find those yourself.
Should you run out and get X-Men Legends 2? Tough call, it's an enjoyable game, but not a "must have" game. If you like action games and X-men then go ahead and get it because you're likely to enjoy it. If you are more a casual fan it would make a good rental but don't expect to finish it. It's a solid 20+ hours first time through. It can get tedious at times but mostly it's solid fun. It's easy to progress throughout the game after the first chapter as you will be competent at using the combos, special attacks etc. The controls are all dead simple. X2 includes online for up to four players but personally playing with just offline two players was frustrating. Mostly because one person wants to go this way, and the other player is wandering somewhere else. There is very little draw distance [zooming out], so I'd recommend getting to know the game well before bothering with two or more players. Then you could work as a cohesive team to flip switches and bust heads. Frankly, it's VERY much like the old Gauntlet games, the top down four-player action I mean. If you can play that, then you can play X2 easy.
by: Australian Ninja
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More articles by Australian Ninja
I can still count the number of FUN and playable X-Men video-games on one hand. This game is solid quality-jollity so have a go. | |
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