X-men Legends 2
by William the Bloody
Magneto and his Brotherhood are breaking into a heavily defended building. They stumble across Wolverine in the halls... a fight is about to ensue.... right? Wrong. They work together to reach the center of the compound which contains.... a captive professor Xavier! It seems the people responsible for holding Xavier at this facility are so fearsome and terrible that the unthinkable has happened in that the Brotherhood and the X-men must work together to bring them down!
The Good: All of the stuff I loved from the original game are still here, but even improved! I swear, it was like they had read my last review and fixed several of my problems with the first game. For starters, no more single player levels, which is very, very important I think, because like I said, if you're playing with friends, who wants to sit back and watch while only one guy plays for a while? They cut back dramatically on the "rescue people" missions, which is good because I liked those the least. They improved on the overall sound quality of the dialogue so that now every recording sounds pristine. I was very glad to discover that they kept on about 98% of the same voice talent for the returning characters, because I'm a continuity snob like that, and the replacement voices for this game (all I can think of right now are Magneto and Colossus) are even BETTER voice actors than they had on before. I was ecstatic that since the premise to this game had the Brotherhood and the X-men were working together, that I'd get to play some villain characters, and Magneto and Juggernaut kick some major ass! I was pleased to find that now you have to actually work to unlock the three secret characters whereas in the first game they kinda just turned up as part of the story and then you could play them. Being able to once again skin my characters is super keen and some of the more popular ones have upwards of six variations! Also, depending on your line up choice, you can get special team bonuses! For example, if you were to play all villains (re: Magneto, Juggernaut, Scarlet Witch, and Toad) you'd get a Brotherhood of Evil bonus or if you choose more recent X-men (re: Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Bishop) you get a New X-men bonus, which can range from increased attack rating to increased maximum energy. Nice! The music was very good and had a very serious and dramatic feel to it with its orchestrations, unlike the first game which had electric guitar and thumping beats. It is also very easy to navigate with good camera angles, which are manually movable if desired via the right analogue stick. Being able to go back a replay levels you already beat is a brilliant feature, especially since there are bonuses if you manage to collect things like Danger Room discs and homing beacons, and this allows you to retrace your steps if you realize later you've missed one. The best feature, however, is that now you can save your leveled up characters after you beat the game and you can start over from the beginning with your level 50 Storm, et al. and really stir some shit up!
The Bad: It's a little disappointing that some of the characters have as few as four to two skins. Oh well. Also, some of the characters they elected to include seemed peculiar to me, such as Sunfire. What the Hell, right? Talk about D-tier X-men! We can play Sunfire, but sadly STILL not Kitty Pryde, but at least she made an appearance in the game's plot (and interestingly enough, no Dazzler yet, either. I guess she knows where she stands in the X-hierarchy). As far as plot devices go, I was never a fan of Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Stryfe and all that associated nonsense. I really, really disliked all that stuff in turning Angel into Arch Angel and blah, blah and the Age Apocalypse tie-ins were pretty stupid as well. I hate that Candyman guy. Just hate 'im. I was all to glad to take his ass down. And speaking of taking guys down... remember how the final boss to X-men Legends 1 was really hard? Well, now the last boss (Apocalypse and his Horsemen) is just all too easy! I beat them on the first go and it felt very disappointing and anticlimactic.
All in all, I loved playing this game! It was just as much fun as the original, but dramatically improved where needed. The first game had some of the AI characters accidentally wandering off cliffs every once in a while, but now it rarely happens at all. The ability to inter-level navigate is awesome as is the ability to save everything you earned for a future game. Giving us some evil mutants to play was a master stroke, but the actual villains (bosses) of the game were characters I never liked and were too easy to beat. Even so, it's still great fun and makes me hope they make X-men Legends 3. Who could they possibly have for a villain? Um... Dark Phoenix Saga, anyone?
A