Gaming Generations :: Legendary

NickD · Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 3:47 pm Post subject: Legendary

Legendary

Publisher: Gamecock Media Group
Developer: Spark Unlimited
Official Website: http://www.legendarythebox.com/
Release Date: 11/4/2008
Genre: Fantasy First Person Shooter
Number of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: Mature
----------------------------------------------------------
REVIEW

This is a game I had been looking forward to since I heard about it a year or so ago. The concept of opening Pandora’s Box and then mopping up a bunch of mythical monsters was just awesome.

…Then the game came out and got an average review somewhere around 4 and I thought I was going to just skip over it. Instead, I went in the GG a few days ago and asked Evan what he wanted reviewed. Since I had done a bunch of stuff that I had previously wanted to play, I decided it was only fair to take a request from the guy who lets me borrow these games for free.

So, I took Legendary home with me and spent a night and some with it. I decided to play the game on hard and skip over easy and normal in order to try and get the better achievements (because I find getting achievements entertaining). Sadly, I would have rather have gotten gonorrhea.

PLOT

Your name is Jack Deckard and a mysterious man named LeFey who wants you to open Pandora’s Box. For some reason, you decide that this is a good idea. One of LeFey’s assistants, Vivian, is helping you to do this.
After you open the box, which happens right away, your hand is stabbed and branded with a “signet” that gives you the ability to suck Animus out of any dead creatures that came from the box. This can then be used to heal yourself or to “force push” some enemies.

Suddenly, Vivian tells you that LeFey’s men want you and her dead. Somehow, this is a surprise, even though the organization run by LeFey is called the Black Order. So, Vivian calls up an opponent group known as the Council and you assist them in the rest of the missions so LeFey can’t fulfill his evil plot.

Also, for some reason, you’re always wearing a suit jacket and white button-up shirt, despite the fact that you’ve allied with some mercenaries and are going to be fighting werewolves and griffons...

A lot of the story is presented in cutscenes, but there are tons of data pieces to be collected and read. Hypothetically speaking, this would add a significant amount of time on to the game.

SETTING

Well, there’s a lot above ground in New York, but a LOT of the game takes place in the sewers. The areas are very poorly designed for the most part, which becomes annoying when you have to back-track through part of the game.

GAMEPLAY

Hmmm… where do I start? Oh yeah…

I’ll list the good gameplay elements:

The animus ability is interesting.

Now the bad:

The animus is horribly designed. You use the Y button to heal yourself AND to suck in the animus. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that you have a life bar and what is essentially a storage space for animus. Now, when you’re down on health but don’t have a full storage tank, when you suck in animus it goes to the storage tank. Since Y heals you AND sucks in animus, this gets to be annoying when you’re swamped by enemies. Oh, and you will be swamped by enemies, because all the creatures constantly respawn, at least in most parts of the game.

The guns in the game just aren’t interesting. In a game revolving around mythical beasts, all you get are a bunch of current style weapons. You never get any other cool animus abilities and the “force push” drains your animus storage each time you use it. Health vs force push isn’t much of a debate. For some reason, the Desert Eagle is THE best gun in the game, barring the rocket launcher. I understand that a magnum packs a big punch, but when it kills a griffon with 20 or so rounds and an M249 SAW can’t kill one with nearly 400 rounds, the weapons need a little bit more balance.

Collision detection and clipping are HORRIBLE. For some reason, a tiny rock can’t simply be stepped over and jumping on top of it can be difficult. This combines with the fact that the AI (at least the human AI) is completely retarded to lead to large amounts of frustration. There are plenty of times when the enemy soldiers will stand so that their heads are sticking out from behind a box or wall and your shot will hit an invisible wall in front of their head. It also doesn’t help that things randomly fly through pieces of the walls. For example, in at least 10 different situations I shot a werewolf and it went flying and its head got stuck in the wall. Now, this normally wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that you need to cut off their heads or they will regenerate and come back after you. And of course, when they come back to life they magically fall back out of the wall. There were also a few times that I literally saw bullets come through my cover and hit me. No luck with invisible walls on my end. There were also a few times that I literally had grenades bounce back at me off of nothingness or had rockets explode in my face when nothing was right in front of me.

The boss fights aren’t too bad for the most part, but the ones that ARE bad end up being terrible. Some of the big enemies can crush you in one shot. This happens without warning and is possibly the most frustrating thing ever when you get no warning. Now, I understand that getting hit by a giant limb would crush a normal person, but the Box injected me with magical Animus powers, right? Guess not. There is one point where you need to shoot the rocket launcher at a large enemy by locking on. However, the launcher locks on to the EXACT parts you need to hit by no other explanation but sheer luck. It even knows what parts you need to hit at which times! (Maybe that's the Animus working?)

The game’s AI is usually pretty good, but it ends up getting ridiculous at some points. There are some areas where enemies are just sitting in this tiny room, waiting for you to get close enough to cue their entrance. For some cover, I went into one of these little rooms and once you go in there, the AI for some reason decides that it can’t get you and some things will just run off for no reason.

Opening doors becomes the most monotonous task. One of the first things you do in the game is pull the keypad off of a door with an electronic lock and “bypass” it by holding X and connecting the other wires together. This process takes at least 5 seconds of your time. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, except that Legendary seems to think that these locks are on almost all door in existence and that there aren’t any doors left without them above ground. Either the door has been blown/torn off or you have to use your bypass skills. How about a little tap the right buttons quick minigame that shocks you a tiny bit if you mess up? Nope, just hold X for five seconds. Even more frustrating is the fact that you almost never have enemies in the room when you’re trying to open these doors, which makes the 5 second process seem pointless. Even if you do have enemies with you, odds are they’ll respawn and eat you anyways. The subways and sewers are largely the same way, but instead of having a keypad to rip off, you have a valve to twist.

The stamina of Jack Deckard seems to be roughly equivalent to that of a 600 pound man as he can only sprint in short bursts without becoming tired and having to let his stamina reload. Not a big deal, except for the fact that he’s not wearing heavy body armor or anything and you can only carry 2 guns at once. Guess Animus failed us again. For some reason, you can only jump about 1 foot while normally walking, but when you run, you suddenly become an Olympic-class long jumper.

A LOT of the small things in the game, like Naris (which are like evil fairies) stealing stuff and moving it, become redundant plain annoying. The whole game is incredibly linear, making it seem more like a crappy thrill ride than something you’d do for fun. On top of that, a lot of the enemies don’t react much to the gunfire at all (griffon, minotaur, firedrake) and the ones that do react to it very inconsistently (soldiers, werewolves). Sometimes the ones that do react fall down because of an up-close shotgun blast, and sometimes they just keep slashing your face off.

GRAPHICS

Horrible. The game looks like it was made at the beginning of the 360’s life rather than 3 years into it. The Unreal 3 engine provides lots of great texture pop-in. This is easily one of the ugliest games I’ve played on the 360 in the last 2 years.

SOUND

The sound gets annoying sometimes as the music is very generic “hard rock.” The animal and gun noises didn’t seem noticeably bad to me though.

SUMMARY

A lot of the story is presented in cutscenes, but there are tons of data pieces to be collected and read. Hypothetically speaking, this would add a significant amount of time on to the game since the game only takes around 6 hours, cutscenes included. Speaking of cutscenes, while some of the are cool, including a hilarious last villain death, most of them are boring and poorly done. It doesn’t help that you can’t skip through them if you died and have to re-load from the last checkpoint.

This is THE worst game I’ve played on the 360. Then again, this was made by the same company who made Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, which had such a bad demo that I didn't even consider playing the actual game. The graphics reek of 3 years ago and the gameplay is oftentimes outclassed by Goldeneye on the N64. The premise of the game was good, but the actual story is pointless and almost completely nonsensical. There are some cool parts, mostly in cutscenes or parts where you first run into a certain type of monster, but most of the game just sucks.

Personally, I definitely wouldn’t buy this game and I would definitely recommend renting one of the other great games that have come out in the last few weeks rather than suffering through this. It doesn't help that, after beating the whole game in 7 hours on Hard mode, I didn't unlock ANY of the "Complete game" achievements. Apparently, to get all of them, you need to beat the game on each difficulty level since the achievements don't stack.JJ should love this score...

Overall Score: 2/10

----------------------------------------------------------

Pictures courtesy of GameSpot.com
----------------------------------------------------------
Nick
_________________
Finished Reviews:
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)
Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (DS)
Ninja Gaiden II
Battlefield: Bad Company (360)
Gears of War
Too Human
Dead Space (360)
Legendary (360)
EndWar (360)
Fallout 3

Writer, Actor in Flingshot Productions