X-Men Legends

Character Management

What would an RPG be without experience points and leveling up, though, and X-Men Legends as a great system in place for character management. You earn experience by defeating enemies and completing objectives. When you have enough experience, an indicator pops up on screen that lets you know so you can then pause the game and level up your characters. Any experience you earn is shared by all X-Men, even the ones that aren’t currently in your party, so you don’t have to worry about having weaker or stronger characters as the game goes on. When you gain a level, you can add a point to your offense, defense, health, and mutant energy stats. You can also spend points on your characters’ powers. The powers include both the obvious ones you would associate with each character, but there are also powers that give you extra experience points or increase melee attack damage.

Multiplayer

There are also a handful of multiplayer options in X-Men Legends as well. At any time, up to four human players can play through the main story mode. This is a fun way to get through a tough section of the game and makes everything a whole lot easier since you’ll have human players helping you out. In addition to this co-op mode option, you can also fight your friends head to head in a separate multiplayer mode. In this mode you are allowed to play as not only the X-Men, but all of the different enemy mutants and soldiers as well. These multiplayer modes add a lot of replay value to a game that is already going to have you playing for quite a while. And that is a very good thing.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in X-Men Legends look great. The characters are cel-shaded while the background are not, so this works to give the game a nice unique look and place extra emphasis on the characters and action. All of the different characters are nicely detailed and it is easy to tell them apart. The environments also look really good and feature a lot of destructible elements that you can play with.

To go along with the nice visuals is some equally nice audio. Because of the fact that you can select many different combinations of X-Men for missions, not all of the dialogue has been done by voice actors. For major sequences when only one character could deliver the line, it is spoken and it sounds great. Full voice acting throughout the game would have been great, but it is understandable why it isn’t there. There is still a lot of voice work in the game nevertheless, though, and it all sounds great. The music suits the action onscreen and sound very good as well. Sounds for all of the fighting and special powers are also well done and nothing really stands out as being out of place or inappropriate.

Bottom Line

If you are a fan of the X-Men, you will absolutely love this game. It was put together with the love and care and attention that the franchise deserves and it really shows. This game was created by fans, for fans. Even if you are only a casual fan of the X-Men, the gameplay in Legends is good enough that it is still worth a look. The story is also really outstanding and interesting enough that anyone, not just fans, will want to see through to the end. Give it a rent if you are unsure, but X-Men Legends is long enough and offers enough replay value that it is worth a purchase.