X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse manages the neat trick of being too easy and too complex all that the same time.
How is this possible? Let’s start with the complexity issue.
This game is one in a long line of Baldur’s Gate-style dungeon-crawling, hack ‘n slash RPGs, where your character starts out at first level and then gains experience, levels and treasure through combat. Every time the character gains a level, you can assign newly acquired attribute points to improve the characters’ skills or give him new special powers. And, of course, there’s lots of treasure to mix and match for maximum effect. You spend as much time customizing your character as you do sending him to fight the baddies in the dungeon.
The trick with the X-Men Legends games (and Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Justice League Heroes) is that you control a team of four characters, each of whom is completely customizable. What’s more, there’s a whole reserve of other characters who can join your team, so you can trick out the individual heroes and then create your ideal team of heroes.
Frankly, that’s far too much character management for me. I’ll dedicate the time to perfecting a single character, but managing 16 characters is a waste of my gaming time. Fortunately, the game allows you to automate the levelling-up process for each character - items are automatically swapped between characters for maximum efficiency, and skill and mutant power points are allocated according to a pre-determined scheme. Sure, you sacrifice the ability to personalize your characters, but at least you’re not taking a break every ten minutes to fix your characters.
Automating the character advancement also makes the game easier. Sure, there’s a nominal difficulty level setting at the start of the game but, compared to the first X-Men Legends game, the sequel is a button-mashing cinch. In the first game, my characters died all the time, and I was having to spend my gold (sorry, “tech bits”) to have them resurrected, or, if I didn’t have enough money, I had to make do with supporting characters, which forced me to play with different team combinations.
I winced every time I had to play Gambit. I really did.
In this game, I was able to run through the entire game with the default team of Wolverine, Storm, Magneto and Cyclops. Occasionally I’d get bored, and throw in Colossus and Nightcrawler to shake things up, but my characters only died when I accidentally walked them over cliffs. There were no levels that forced me to play with pre-determined teams - such as the psychic plane level or the flashback level in the first game - and no reason to build up other characters.
There are only four character classes in the game: The flier (Storm), the bridge-builder (Magneto), the ranged attacker (Cyclops) and the brawler (Wolverine). Once you have the team, you’re set for everything a level can throw at you. If Magneto isn’t available, you can use Jean Grey or Iceman to build bridges; if Storm isn’t there to fly, you can use Sunfire; and Juggernaut bashes through the bad guys just as readily as Wolverine, etc.
So, you can play the game without thinking too much about the characters, which is fine, because the story itself is pretty fun: Apocalypse has attacked the earth, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants band together to fight the threat. Your team fetches keys, collects items, rescues other heroes and guides the occasional support character through a level. But mostly you fight. Eventually, you take on a giant-sized Apocalypse.
The appeal of the game is seeing the characters and settings from the comics represented onscreen. While this is fun for a comics fan, it doesn’t mean much to the non-comics fan. Fortunately, there’s a huge overlap between gamers and comic fans.
The villains are taken from the breadth of recent X-Comics history: Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Stryfe, Sugar Man, The Living Monolith, and Archangel. The battles range from Genosha to the Savage Land, New York City, a power plant in Ontario and the pyramids of Giza. The supporting NPCs include Ka-Zar, Sebastien Shaw, Banshee and Heather Hudson from Alpha Flight! (Yes, I’m an Alpha Flight fan.)
While you’re fighting, you can pick up extra collectables. There are data discs on each level. When you collect enough, you earn inventory bonuses for your team - usually its an increase to your capacity for health and energy packs. You can also collect homing beacons. When you have all of those, you open a mini-level where your team fights through a group of stronger bad guys to pick up a special artifact: a piece of Iron Man’s armour. Eventually, you rescue Tony Stark and he joins your team.
Now, what Iron Man is doing in an X-Men story is beyond me, but he’s a cool character and it’s fun to see him jetting around and blasting troops with his repulsors.
The game retains some of the other cool extras from the first game, such as the Trivia Game on each level - it’s a fun way to gain fast experience for your characters - and the Danger Room training missions for extra powers. There are Danger Room sessions for specific characters and for general characters, which will give a completist lots to work on.
There’s one huge improvement to the game world navigation: you can teleport to the home base at any time, and you can jump from X-Traction point to X-Traction point across the game, which, gives you a chance to recover some items you may have missed throughout the game. This makes saving your progress much easier.
All in all X-Men Legends II is a solid bit of superheroic entertainment. It’s not a particularly challenging game, but if you’re in the mood to watch mutants fighting for the lives, then you’re in for a good time. It’s light-years ahead of the atrocious X-Men 3 movie!
