X-MEN LEGENDS.
© Activision

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PREVIEW: X-Men Legends

When Activision invited Cinescape to check out the newest build of X-MEN LEGENDS, we jumped at the chance. After getting several hours with the game, it may go down as the best X-MEN game ever.

X-MEN LEGENDS is for all intents and purposes a beat 'em up game. But it's not brainless. The game features many RPG elements in that it has experience points, armor to equip, health items, stores, and character growth. In addition to all of that, there are three types of attacks in the game: physical (punches, Wolverine's claws), energy (Cyclops's optical beam), and mental (Jean Rea's mental attacks).

The game starts off with a player in the role of Wolverine chasing the Blob who has captured a girl named Alison. The game introduces the player to the highly destructible environments and throwable objects, the quick and fierce attack (and plethora of combos of combinations) as well as healing items and energy items. The early section allows gamers to experiment with the gameplay without having to worry about teammates.

After the first mission, the game heads to the Xavier Institute where Alison can explore the building and eventually discover missions for the X-Men to take on. At this point the game becomes a four-player affair as four X-Men go into battle together. This is a major part of the game as in the later levels even with level 30 characters the computer AI posed a serious challenge if the wrong set of characters were brought in (Wolverine isn't a good choice vs. physical resistant characters, nor is Cyclops against energy resistant enemies).

In the end, fifteen X-MEN will be selectable, offering a wide array of selection for your team of four. X-MEN fans will easily recognize the fifteen selections which include heros such as the aforementioned Wolverine, Cyclops, and Jean Grey as well as Gambit, Rogue, Colossus, Iceman, Nightcrawler, Beast, Storm and a few others.

Each character has different statistics and special attributes that will be leveled up based on the experience gained in battles. While the four active X-Men will always receive slightly more experience, the other fighters won't be too far behind, and new fighters that join in the middle of the campaign will be well prepared for the current level of combat.

The characters all have trademark special moves as well such as Nightcrawler's ability to teleport (and even teleport allies or enemies), Storm's ability to control the weather, and other characters can even fly. All of these specials require energy though which can be gained in combat or by using one of the nifty energy packs that the team carries in (hopefully) good supply. You can go through a lot of power-ups in the boss fights as most of them are actually rather difficult.

The actual combat itself seems straight forward, but there are a lot of variances to it based on the personnel

A screenshot from X-MEN LEGENDS.

© Activision

The story mode should have a full X-MEN style story with plenty of twists and turns and popular villains like Pyro, Toad and Magneto making appearances to humble you in boss fights. The story should be interesting, especially with the large amount of characters in the game to interact with. Even in levels NPCs will sometimes have RPG-style conversations with a list of questions the player can ask.

The game will feature plenty of extras in addition to what looks to be a deep story mode. One of these is the Danger Room. This is a training holodeck of sorts that allows the player to earn experience as well as learn the systems in the game. Different training programs are hidden throughout the game and three of them represent historial X-MEN missions including throwback costumes for the characters. One took place in New York, and the other when Juggernaut invades the Xavier Institute. There are also concept art galleries, X-Men and Enemy bios, as well as comics.

One of the best additions to the game is that at any time another player (or three) can join in and drop out. While the one-player mode is quite a bit of fun, the game promises to be even more strategic, entertaining and fun with four human players overriding the computer AI controlled ones. When I play through the review build of the game I want to play it with three friends. The one-player is good, but I'm a huge fan of co-op and this game was made for it. Expect heavy arguments between you and your friends when it comes to who gets to use Wolverine he's a blast to play (you can already see the Penny-Arcade strip about the guy who always must be Wolverine).

The graphics in the game look quite nice, with some cel-shading techniques applied to the character models to make them standout from the background. It's not true cel-shading as they are still polygonal, but it the effect is awesome and conveys the appropriate look. The on screen fighting and animation is excellent and is a lot of fun to watch. The sound was a bit harder to hear in the play environment we had, but many of the movie actors signed on to voice their characters (including Patrick Stewart in arguably the most important addition to the crew) and the music that I heard was solid.

On a sidenote, the Xbox version supports widescreen and progressive scan, whereas the GameCube and PS2 versions don't. It's not a major issue, but might be important to some.

After our time with the game we speculate that fans of X-MEN won't be disappointed with LEGENDS launches on all three consoles later this month.