Then again some legends were meant to be forgotten

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

Pub: Activision
Dev: Raven Software

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- The camera angle is too far away to give the player any real sense of action.
- The menu screen is flawfully designed w/ bold yellows that mask the white text. Meanwhile there is no consistency in navigation buttons. Sometimes they'll be on the bottom, sometimes the side, and sometimes not even present at all. wtf?
- The game's bird's eye view action is also cut short when characters constantly level up requiring the player to distribute skill & attribute points. The players level up too easily and too often. The game comes off as patronizing the player by rewarding them with levels for taking 20 steps in any direction.
- Cell shading? It looks as if the developers took 2nd rate skins and dipped them in a candy glaze. This style makes the game come off as some sort of saturday morning cartoon, and with the loads of obscure AND colorful characters they have added it seems that way twice as much. Any hardcore fan playing this game, and trust me they're the only ones that are, don't want to see the cartoon X-Men. No one does.
+ Content? There are an ungodly amount of unlockables ranging from videos to the cliched comic book covers. Both of which are unlocked by finding them throughout the game. What is this Tony Hawk's X-men? There is also a trivia game based on the comic books. Getting answers right earns you experiance points for the team. Flex those comic engraved neurons!
+ Monotonus gameplay. I, more than often, found myself running up to enemies & disposing them with continuous AAB combos. Run, AAB, run, AAB, run some more, AAB, level, rinse, repeat. Occasionally, I'd use a mutant power to spice things up, but I never found it all that necessary to advance in the game.
+ Patrick Stewart! 'nuff said. He lends his voice for Professor Xavier.
+ An online co-op play of up to 4 players. That's pretty damn cool. Actually, I've been wanting this in games for awhile now. It's just a shame that this game had to suck.

Bottom Line

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It's a dungeon crawler with X-Men, and enough micro-management to choke a donkey. I don't think this game deserves the $49.99 pricetag that is attached to it. I could understand a $39.99 tag, but only because of the uncannily massive amount of content in the game. However, even $40 is too much for me to pay for this X-Pile. If you're a fan of the first one then you'll probably like the 2nd one, you poor sap.

2/5