X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse

Another Marvel-lous RPG?

X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypseis home to some extra-fancy eye candy
In the comic world there are few supergroups and fewer universes as well known, well regarded and expansive as the X-Men and all that surrounds them.
The subject of several movies, literally thousands of comics and spin-offs and the kind of merchandising only Marvel is capable of, video-games based on this popular franchise have been hitting the streets since the early nineties, almost always in the form of relatively mundane scrolling beat-em-ups.
After all, X-Men has never been about tea parties, it's been about conflict, about beating the living hell out of genetically deformed freaks of nature.
Ahhh, for the good old days when gaming was simple...
In an intriguing change of tack, X-Men Legends added RPG elements and a spiffy 3D engine to the mix and was a fun (if formulaic) dungeon crawler. This time around, those who bemoaned the lack of playable canon characters in the first game have had their cries answered, though if you weren't exactly impressed by the reliable but uninspired first entry in the series you're unlikely to be lured back, as there isn't much here that you haven't seen done before, and done better, might I add.
Set directly after the destruction of the mutant island hideout Genosha by power-crazy mutant Apocalypse, Legends 2 provides the unlikeliest of alliances between the X-Men and their direct rivals, the Brotherhood, in an effort to take on Apocalypse, who is arguably the most powerful mutant to ever shake his fist skyward.
To be quite honest, the storyline at play here is pretty weak by conventional standards, but it's enough to get by on between romps through enemy facilities and over foreign ground, and when the end result is the ability to pick a team from fifteen initially playable canon characters from both sides of the fence (with three to be unlocked), you tend to overlook the occasional plot inconsistency.
Tearing through wave after wave of enemy grunts and gaining experience with each kill, you and your party (the members of which can be switched out at any time to deal with the various puzzles that come up) level up and gain new mutant skills as they move along.
In between, you'll have to dodge sentry turrets, find keys and work your mutant magic on the pseudo-destructible environment. I say pseudo because it's strictly regimented which items in the game world you can actually destroy, and the range is more than a little lacking. I don't call a few lonely water pipes and the occasional wall very original. Red Faction this is not.
The X-Men gain mutant energy fromstanding on fried ostrich and emu eggs
Sugarman is a big favourite at rave parties
Now, if you can get past the gimmicky destroy-some-stuff-around-you concept, the rest of Legends 2 sounds pretty cool, but in practice is less fun than it sounds or should be, most particularly as, while you can delegate the responsibility of skill-picking/experience-spending/item-equipping to the CPU (which in effect makes the large majority of the RPG component of Legends 2 completely redundant), attempting to personally configure each of your team members or even change settings is a massive pain courtesy of one of the slowest, not to mention most painfully non-intuitive interfaces to ever grace the PS2.
There are massive load times to get into the interface and similarly gargantuan load times to get out, and in between you have to cope with the brain-deadeningly weird menu system.
It doesn't help that the entire game shares those horrendous load times, either, and for no apparent reason, since Legends 2 is certainly not bursting at the seams with special effects or high-polygon models; developer Raven Software went for a more cartoonish, cel-shaded, Ultimate-Spider-Man-esque comic book look.
Sons of Liberty, a game designed to test the limits of the system, and with a longer overall play-time, did not take nearly this long to load, which one would suspect says something about Legends 2.
Add to this that - barring their special attacks - most of the playable characters share a significant portion of the same attack animations and things are beginning to look decidedly sloppy.
The actual combat guts of the game aren't so bad, ironically, and whilst you brawl with the ever-increasing opposition you can program the AI of your team-members, so that they hang back and use ranged attacks (in the case of characters like Storm) or get right into the action (Juggernaut and Wolverine, as an example).
Though, again, it's difficult to care when navigating through the interface is about as user-friendly as solving heuristic algorithms.
I've been told that the overall loading times which make party customisation such an organ-rending pain are not nearly so severe on the Xbox and PC versions of the game, but this is still inexcusable given the apparently minimal graphical differences between the PS2 iteration and its higher-end siblings.
If there is one adjective that comes to mind in the writing of this review it is 'mediocre' and this extends from the minutiae of gameplay to the sound department which, bar the always-excellent work of Patrick Stewart (reprising his film role as Professor X), seems to be relying heavily on a large cast of average sound-alikes, a fact not helped by the lack of vocal and catchphrase variety, which often leads to the same sound bytes being played over and over and over again until you want to bash Gambit's Cajun brains out with a table lamp.
On occasion Rise of Apocalypse manages to rise above its humble origins and significant flaws, but in the end we've seen it all before. Legends 2 is hardly the revelation that one might have hoped for, and, hamstrung by a crude interface, atrocious load times and average gameplay, only the hardcore X-Men fans need apply. Of which there are millions, so enjoy!
Game: X-Men Legends 2: Rise of ApocalypseSystem: PS2Players: 1-4Online: NoDeveloper: Raven SoftwareDistributor: Activision
Rating: 70%