Aliens, Terminator 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Bride of Frankenstein. Diablo 2, Resident Evil 2, Batman: Arkham City. Second Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Doctor Sleep. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Se- alright, do you get what I'm putting down here yet? I'm running out of off-the-cuff sequels. Those are all sequels that are considered at least equal to their predecessors, if not better than the original. Making a successful follow up to something already well received itself can be a famously hard thing to pull off, as for every Bride of Frankenstein or Arkham City there's a Crackdown 2, or god forbid even a Devil May Cry 2.
Where am I going with this? X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse, it's the article. Why would you ask that?
XML2 did what all good sequels do; take the same core idea, and just make it bigger. Bigger stakes. A weirdo guy named Apocalypse who's trying to end the world in some sort of literal apocalypse. Add in more ****, and reiterate on the same formula and improve it without replacing or fundamentally changing it. Playable Magneto. Playable Juggernaut, lariating through walls and enemies. Sword-slashing swashbuckling Nightcrawler. You fight insectoid aliens in the jungles of Genosha, who were clearly supposed to be the Brood before getting changed to the ‘Cerci’ for some reason (some of the enemies still have Brood on their nameplate). Did XML1 have monstrous genetically engineered insects biting into Wolverine’s well-marinated hairy Canadian flesh? No. That's how you make a sequel. More ****.
The History
Coming out in September 2005, exactly a day before the one-year anniversary of the first game which is kind of weird, X-Men Legends 2 had a very fast development to put it mildly. It was announced exactly a single month after the release of the first game, well before the N-Gage version was even released the following February which everyone was obviously eagerly awaiting. It was first announced in October 2004, so at best it had less than a year of active development. Like its predecessor in the ‘slapping-but-also-stat-pointing’ genre, it came out on all three 7th gen consoles as well as the N-Gage again for the 5 people who owned one to be able to play the complete X-Men Legends duology. Rise of Apocalypse this time around did make three additional releases; a Windows version came out alongside the console releases, a month later saw it on the hottest item of the streets at the time of the PSP, and it also saw release on the primordial mobile phones of 2005. That's right, you could slap the **** out of some goons on your Motorola RAZR, in a version of the game that I'm pretty sure actually no gameplay videos or screenshots have survived of.This rushed development sounds like a gaming disaster waiting to happen, but the game met its deadlines regardless; definitely hold on to that thought for later though when we actually talk about the game, as this short development cycle definitely had some consequences. Dev time was greatly sped up by the fact they had a working technical framework already they just ported over from the first game, luckily. Raven didn't collaborate with the writing group Man of Action again on the story this time, and instead directly worked with Marvel themselves to adapt Apocalypse into playable slapping-simulator format.
During development, there were apparently a lot of concepts thrown around internally on characters that didn't make the cut, as well as a lot of general storyline stuff. There’s quite a few unused characters data still in the game files, from NPCs like Avalanche to seemingly a lot of planned playable characters who got cut at one point or another like Banshee, Polaris and Blob, Dazzler and even Mister Fantastic of all characters; he has a few unused voice lines and a mini floating character head for the HUD in the files from what I've gathered. There was even at one point work done on a playable Forge, which I can confirm would have at least made one cephalopod very happy. Allegedly the team sat down and voted on which characters they wanted to do, and Marvel was giving them more or less a reasonably free reign with them. At one point Shadowcat was going to be playable, but the team ultimately couldn't think ways to design how her no-clip cheat code powers would work which makes sense as that would be a nightmare of implementation and things to worry about. The one thing Marvel gave them a no on apparently was the game utilizing the ‘alternate future’ time travel angle of the Age of Apocalypse comic arc, so instead they were instructed to not do that and have the game's events take place in the modern era. Odd veto to me, but whatever Marvel. At one point Raven was even thinking of doing a Days of Future Past adaptation instead, which I think would have been wild and I kind of want that now to be honest.
The PC release has two additional characters over the console versions being Sabertooth and Pyro. This sounds really sick until you learn that they are just reskins of existing characters, for some reason, and otherwise entirely identical; Victor is just a reskin of Wolverine with inexplicably one less power point, for some reason, while Pyro is just an Australian-ified Sunfire.
The PSP has less buttons so the control scheme was changed for one, mainly in how you use your potions. There's some new Danger Room missions included that you get from collecting the comic books lying around that are present in every version, and it also has a different camera system, being one a little more zoomed in and dynamic in how it moves around the environment. It's pretty noticeable for something so minor. And to top it all off, the PSP has four additional characters to smash against things, blocky fists first; Dark Phoenix, mother****in’ Cable, Cannonball and X-Man, an alternate reality version of Cable from another alternate future. Comics. All this added into consideration, the PSP could be considered the ‘definitive version’ of RoA. In my opinion; eh, I guess. The new characters are nice for sure, particularly Cable and psychotically mean Jean, but the new control scheme really bothers me in all honesty. The new Danger Room missions are just more content I can't deny that, but they're not so huge or different from the missions already in the game that I'd say you need to play them. I'd still say the home console versions are fine by me just for the easier control scheme, but I won't fight anyone who says they prefer the PSP.
For this review, you are once again looking at the jade-and-grey behemoth of the OG Xbox in the screenshots for its crisper visuals than the other console versions.
The Game
As the sequel to the original XML, Rise of Apocalypse continues the same basic formula and design of the ARPG genre just more refined and with more stuff shoved inside it, and some changes added in.It has the X-Men battle against, fittingly, the rise of Apocalypse, a purple ancient Egyptian mutant who more-or-less claims himself as ruler of all his kind as he was the first. Taking place sometime after the first game, Apocalypse and his big ol’ ‘A’ branded chest armour has launched attacks all over the globe using his army of generically and cybernetically enhanced goons, just a whole bunch of secondary X-Men villains like Sugarman and Omega Red, and his big bad lieutenants he calls his ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (do you get that he’s trying to bring about some sort of apocalypse yet? His branding is really on point) in order to destroy the X-Chickens. His ultimate goal? World and mutant domination, the usual schtick.
But this greater enemy and greater scale has made an alliance that the purple-lipped wannabe god couldn't have predicted; the X-Men and Brotherhood of Mutants team up to slap the **** out of things together, and also spend their power points of course. This alliance makes for a much more fun game in a few ways, as I think letting you unendingly abuse nameless goons as Magneto and Juggernaut alongside the usual goody-good boy scout Cyclops adds some spice in for sure.
The roster this time around is up to 16 initial characters with 3 secret unlockable ones, from the previous games’ final roster size of 14. These 16 characters are also all available from the beginning, so you don't have to wait to play as Colossus for example like you had to do in the first Legends. Of these initial 16 characters, 4 are the all new (in terms of playable status) Brotherhood members and the other half are X-Men. The game's roster is once again filled with solid picks all around, covering the essential goody-goods and the essential former baddies. You got the previously mentioned Magneto and Juggernaut, the hex queen Scarlet Witch and, uh, Toad, everyone's favourite punching bag.
The good guy roster this time has some new characters as well, but some cuts were unfortunately made as not every playable X-Person from XML1 successfully made the crossing. Bishop, the time traveling energy manipulator and ridiculous 90’s gunwielder, and the fiery Japanese man Sunfire join the roster this time around, but at the expense of Psylocke, Emma Frost, Magma, Jubilee and, to my great sadness, my main blue furry Beast. I'm not mad, okay? Some of these missing playable slappers still make an appearance as NPCs integral to the story, like thankfully Beast and Emma Frost, but the others are simply never mentioned again, lost to the shared abyss that's the fate of many other forgotten X-Men. There's a lot of them, they come and go, it makes sense.
Something that's definitely an improvement this time is the costume selection, in that there is costume selection. XML1 required you to beat the game to unlock a single retro themed skin for the characters (not counting the cheat code costumes), but this time around the majority of the characters have two to choose from right off the bat and there's so many you unlock as you play. Most of the retro throwback looks reappear, but there’s also some other skins thrown around as well; some characters get a few new Raven-unique ones like Cyclops’s visor-less military fatigues, and there's just a whole bunch of Age of Apocalypse comic outfits which makes obvious sense.
In the grim darkness of the Apocalypse future there is only war, and thigh pouches and insane fringe hair cuts. Lookin’ extreme there, Cyke.
“Octopus, please, tell me the secret of the 3 hidden characters!” Really weird way to ask that, but I'll give spoilers for one of them just because it's not really kept a secret for very long once you pick up one of the items needed to unlock him; the mother****in’ Armoured Avenger, ol’ Shellhead himself, Iron Man (oddly spelled as Ironman, one word, in-game). Through collecting homing beacons throughout each of the game's five acts, you'll be able to assemble pieces of his armour then rescue him and his pencil mustache, leading to him flying around and slapping things alongside the genetic freaks. I'll also just drop this here; he's likely the best character in the game befitting his secret unlockable status, but he’s aided by one presumably unintended thing we’ll get to later.
The story is a globetrotting extravaganza, bringing you to other X-Hero staples not touched in the first game across the five acts of the game. You stomp through the jungles of Genosha in act one, the fictional island that serves as Magneto’s promised ‘Sanctuary’ for mutants, that's littered with the wreckage of the big battle between Magneto’s air force and Apocalypse’s army. You then go slapping wild in one of my personal favourite X-Places of the Savage Land, tear through Mister Sinister’s industrial clone factories, battle Sentinels on floating anti-air gun batteries, slap around numerous bosses, hang out in the destroyed Weapon X laboratory that's now a hub base that has to kind of suck for Wolverine, and cause a ruckus in an ancient temple populated by a cult that worships Apocalypse as well as the identical triplet Stepford Cuckoos, evil psychics who are very closely associated with Emma Frost though they're not clones of her in this continuity as far as I'm aware. Comics.
The story this time around is a little more ‘grim’ in tone compared to the comparatively very quaint vibe of the original. It's more in line with the late 80’s-early 90’s X-Lore which is fitting as that was the heyday of Apocalypse in the comics, and it takes itself a little more seriously this time around. Not that there isn’t some light hearted goofiness to be found here, usually from the mission briefings cinematics that constantly have the Brotherhood and X-Heroes throwing around schoolyard insults at one another, or has Scarlet Witch taking a liking to the handsomely shiny Colossus which directly leads to him getting a pretty funny talking-to by his girlfriend Kitty Pryde when you meet her in NPC form later.
Poor Piotr, he really bumbles his way through this one. He's far too naive for this stuff.
That's enough rambling about silly things again, let's get into the actual gameplay itself.
The greatest addition of XML2 is the gameplay changes. As I've said a few times, it's a bigger and badder sequel with far more fun stuff baked into the experience this time around.
The first is the powers; there's so much more now. My biggest complaint of the first game was the lack of any power choice with the characters, as everyone only had the four to use. Now, there's more than double that per average freak. It entirely fixed my biggest issue with the first game, imagine that. You get to pick and choose from multiple offensive powers per character, multiple boosts, even from two different X-Treme powers. Some are level locked, others have prerequisites, and you can actually form a gameplan or dare I say unique build per character with them. You can play Sunfire as a ranged immolating ‘nuker’ exploding enemies by looking at them and flexing I guess, just as you could play him as a flame sword-wielding melee scrapper who offensively explodes himself for example. Both of those perform admirably, and even have some choices to make within them.
It does feel pretty good to be the one welcoming people to die as Magneto for once, I can't deny it.
There's some real fun factor **** in this game, Raven wasn't afraid to get a little funky this time around with the powers. Cyclops can spawn electricity blasting turrets, or get an optic beam that splits off from its initial target somehow (don't worry about it, it's fun) or stun enemies by shooting the ground below him. Rogue gets a flying dash punch that clears almost the whole screen as well as the ability to buff the whole teams health regen in exchange for some of her health, Wolverine gets…more claw slashes, but there’s more of them now, and they can either do bleed damage or stun multiple enemies or make them more vulnerable to further damage. Scarlet Witch has an ability with a very low but noticeable chance to turn an enemy into a crate, instantly killing them (with the crate having a chance to drop money or potions like normal) on top of a boost that can give the whole team basically infinite energy, and Iceman who can do his best WoW ice-spec mage imitation by throwing out frost novas or summon little ice minions to harass enemies with. Don't question how these ice dudes are capable of independence and apparently sentient thought, it's best not to worry about these things and the harrowing ramifications they bring. Juggernaut? He has to be the funnest character in the game, letting you do the iconic Jugg charge or deliver massive clotheslines to enemies and fierce jabs that visibly grows his size whenever they land, or use his second X-Treme power to give him Fists of Instant Goon Death for a good ten seconds or so. The greatest strength of XML1 was just how fun it was to get in there and hit buttons, and the sequel absolutely raised it up even higher. This game is fun as **** from a power and character perspective.
This one screenshot alone has almost double the amount of powers as any one character from XML1. Wild.
Another great addition is having a ‘town portal’ available to use basically whenever outside of boss fights, on a 5-minute cool down timer. This is incredibly handy, letting you go back to the current hub base instead of having to wait for an X-Traction point to save or do whatever, like change characters or bully Sabertooth about his secret protectiveness over Blink (who's also making the portals). You're never more than five minutes away from being able to do any of that which is a small but very noticeable benefit.
RoA is a much more serious ARPG in my opinion because of all these fantastic changes. The system is more in depth without getting too complicated, and having more options makes it much more engaging. Included this time around is even a new game plus mode where you can carry over all your characters and gear to a new playthrough, designing the game around multiple runs to hit the higher level cap; this is also the only way to play as the second unlockable character, or to get more than half the final act maybe of playtime with Ironman. There's also a fix for my other complaint about the first time Legends; you can respec your characters power points at the store in every hub for a money cost. The first one per character is 10,000, then any subsequent one after that per character is a steep 99,999 buckaroos. Expensive, but at least the option is always there though.
The bosses this time around are a little more inventive on average, and frequently have some gimmick or set piece to them, like Abyss here.
One last thing before we get into the snarky nitpicks that in this case are at least deserved (spoilers!); this game is much improved graphically over the original Legends. Characters have far more detail to them now, and their hands even have some actual finger definition this time around which is nice to see. The environments specifically are much improved, having some nice lighting effects and much higher-res assets. The X/Brotherhood-Weirdos actually look like they belong to and are part of the background environment now, if that makes sense. I find in the first game they looked like they were independent assets floating above everything, separate models as if they were mutant ghosts. I think it's the fact that characters here have heavier and more dynamic lighting applied to their models now, so it makes them look like they're actually running around in the blown up streets of New York than they did previously where the lighting was mostly flat on them.
Behold! Criticism!
Remember that thought I told you to hold onto earlier, about the game's very fast development time having consequences? And also Ironman being undisputed god-tier mainly from one unintended thing? This game is absolutely busted as ****, that's the thing.
The first game had some little bugs about, like some incorrect power tooltips here and there or that one door in the Morlock sewer area where if you interact with it Beast will get stuck horizontally in the air for some reason. RoA is even worse, though thankfully at least it's only glitched powers and not oddly powerful doors. There's abilities that don't function at all like they were supposed to, like Rogue’s previously mentioned team healing buff. It's supposed to also remove negative debuffs, like the slowing effect of some enemies and whatnot, but it instead removes all effects on a character including positive ones and even gear effects. If you have gear that gives damage bonuses for example, an entirely expected and common gear affix, Rogue’s ability will actually remove the damage bonus due to the way it's coded. Ouch.
There are one or two other major power malfunctions like this unfortunately. Jean’s passive that boosts the mental damage dealt by her powers does not at all do anything. Mag-freaking-neto has a power that causes the affected enemy to take the damage that they're dishing out also on themselves, but the power also causes the damage you do to that enemy to reflect backwards onto your dudes as well, to terrifying effect. AI-controlled Bishop’s full auto gun fire ability sees them doing it for far too long and will often have them staring at a wall and shooting it for no reason, and they'll do it even if the power isn't currently assigned to him. That last one is at least entirely minor and frankly hilarious to watch, but still.
Did Juggernaut just get knocked off his feet? I take back everything good I’ve ever said about this game, non-canon bull**** garbage.
The biggest bug in this game that can legitimately be game-breaking unfortunately is a nasty memory leak issue, though it's fairly easy to avoid. The game drops gear for you to pick up of course, and if you fill the 100 item hub storage and your 20 item inventory fully and leave too many items lying around on the ground, the game eventually loses its mind over having to store this many items in its physical memory and will eventually crash due to this tomfoolery. This mainly occurs in act 4, as for some reason enemies seem to really like to drop loot in that act specifically and by then some people would have stockpiled enough items to trigger this memory cash. There are thankfully some fairly easy ways to avoid this. One is just to pick up and either equip or sell every item, which removes it from the game's memory; you have a free town portal, it's not that out of the way really. Also, don't save enough items to fill the stash and your inventory and you'll also avoid this. It's unfortunate as if the leak does happen and the game crashes, the only way to get around it is to hope you have a previous save to load up and sell items in. The game also only stores in its memory the last 6 maps including their items, so if you had to you could also extract using a save point to 6 new maps to free up the games memory. I'd just recommend equipping or selling everything though to avoid this memory crash from ever happening; you need the money. Don't bother saving level-locked items for later as you'll just get better ones likely by the time you can equip them anyway.
Some of these bugs are in your favour, though. There’s a boost several characters have called ‘Energy Fury’ that states it buffs your team's melee damage by giving them bonus energy damage to their basic slaps, but it instead gives bonus damage to everything including powers. Entirely busted, basically. Ironman, again one word for some reason, has a buff that allegedly is meant to boost his melee attack speed and damage by an insane percentage (up to 700% at max level); it’s bugged and applies to literally every attack he does, including his powers and even his X-Treme. His unibeams turn into orbital laser canons when it’s up, absolutely busted as ****. There’s also a weird but beneficial bug with Nightcrawler where his best power, Teleport Frenzy, will never cost energy to use if you don't have any points assigned to a previous power, for some reason, which is also busted as **** and can let you basically solo the game as him if you wanted to.
This power right here; that’s the stuff you want to absolutely abuse.
These shenanigans raise a good question: does this matter? To what extent does glitchiness affect an experience? I hadn’t ever noticed a good number of these, especially the oddness with some gear affixes, until I was reading up on this stuff for the article. I knew Energy Fury was bugged at least, and that Rogue’s heal buff was pretty terrible so I never used it (but didn't know about it actively debuffing your entire team), that AI Bishop was a really trigger happy goofy guy and that Jean's damage passive never seemed to do anything, but I still absolutely love the hell out of this game all the same.
I think it comes down to just how intrusive and detrimental this rushed glitchiness is. Outside of some choice powers I mentioned that are actively a negative to use like Magneto’s metal prison and Rogue's heal, a lot of it is fairly minor or at least to your benefit. Jean’s entirely non-functional passive is the only instance of that kind of thing, and that does honestly suck, but somehow the rest of the game makes up for Jean being kinda weak damage wise. There is the item memory leak issue, but luckily it's also easy enough to avoid that you may never even have it happen to you, like me.
It's also a little disappointing that your team’s environmental interaction abilities don't really play a major part in the game. I think there were maybe like 3 times I can remember that required you to make a bridge to get somewhere? It's a bit of a downgrade in that department, but the rest of the game's improvements make up for this lack of team building. The game has instead decided to focus more on the brawlin', which considering it's greatly improved upon the game gets away with this to me.
Here's the thing; outside of these issues, the game is exceptional. The game is therefore hard to score for me. On one hand, objectively having non-functional and bugged features is bad. On the other hand, everything else is so good that you almost won't notice how unstable the game is underneath your feet when you're playing it, and there's also almost as many glitches that work in your favour.
Score and Final Thoughts
Score: 8/10 X-GenesX-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse is a much better game than the first, held down by some unfortunate bugs it clearly needed more than maybe a year of development to iron out. What we have is still something exceptional, maybe even astonishing, and beyond fun to throw down in but if they just had worked out the issues with some more cooking time this would have been an easy 9/10 slam dunk. Seriously, abuse Energy Fury and sell every item you don't need, you'll thank me later. I love this game all the same, and it's easily my favorite mechanical gameplay experience of the Raven licensed Marvel game trilogy, outside of the bugs.
“Trilogy, you say?” Why yes, oddly questioning person who doesn't actually exist, the trilogy.
Coming up as the next entry in this retrospective is another game near to my gamer heart that we're going to talk about; Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the spiritual successor to the Legends series, and this time around we’ll even talk about the insane mod scene it and XML2 share.
Until next time.
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