This may come as a surprise, I've only brought it up like maybe 4 or 10 times throughout my very ongoing Marvel retrospective series, but originally my very first review on this site over a year ago now was going to be this game, followed by its sequel Rise of Apocalypse and spiritual successor to the series, Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Then for some reason against all sanity I decided to play every Marvel game from the 3rd to 6th gen leading up to X-Men Legends, and now here we are with this being the 19th article in this retrospective series instead. Help me.
X-Men Legends is therefore a fitting opening to the final leg of my, and by extension anyone who's been reading this retrospective over the last year-and-some-change, licensed game journey. This final journey we’re covering one of the greatest of gaming generations with the 6th. Sony’s holy gift to mankind, blessed be its name and monolithic form, the PlayStation 2; Microsoft’s first foray into console gaming and the one that has just the sickest start up animation, the Xbox; and Nintendo's tiny carrying-handle equipped vanguard, the GameCube.
Up until now, I've been tackling the games in each gen chronologically, so you may be asking “what the hell, you dumb ocean creature; X-Men Legends was the seventh Marvel game to come out in this gen! Liar! Hack fraud! Game journo slop!” My response to that is shut the **** up, strawman voice in my head, I've earned this and don't call me a game journo, please. I've done my grinding to get here, let me have my fun. There's 25 games to cover in this generation, and I've decided that 8 of those are going to be dedicated articles like this. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I'm giving myself a mercy and saying screw chronology, just do what you want to do first so it's the 8 individual articles. After these articles, I'm going to do the usual multi-game format to finish the generation off with the other games…all 17 of them.
There's some good **** in this final journey. I think this gen has some of the greatest individual highs we've yet to have seen since than the arcade years. But then again, for every Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Spider-Man 2 there's an X-Men: Destiny, so maybe some particular low points as well but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
With that rambling out of the way, let's get into Raven Software’s X-Men Legends…’ history section. Finally, I've waited so long to write the boring history section of this game. My tentacles are quivering.
The Astonishing Raven Software
X-Men Legends is the 2004 isometric action-RPG and ‘slap the living hell out of anything that moves’ simulator ARPG brought to us by the storied Raven Software, coming out on all three of the sixth gen consoles…and the Nokia N-Gage, that poor thing. Raven had been around the block for a while by the time they started development on this game. Some may remember them for 1994’s Heretic, one of the first Doom-clones and the only one that holds the distinction of John Romero himself having a producer's credit. There was also the metal as **** Hexen series, Heretic’s same-year sequel. Some may even remember Raven for their 1992 debut, Black Crypt, a pretty solid dungeon crawler or their first collaboration with Id Software using the Wolfenstein engine, 1993’s Shadowcaster.Going into the wild world of the 2000s, Raven continued putting out solid work with two Soldier of Fortune games using the Quake2 engine that revolutionized the world of bloody dismemberment technology with their proprietary GHOUL system; every shot of your Desert Eagle could take bloody, physics integrated chunks of ultra-violence out of your enemies torsos and limbs. Leading up to Legends, Raven had cut their teeth in the licensed game market with 2000's very underrated Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, as well as the very fondly remembered Star Wars: Jedi Knight series, famous for its still-to-this day top tier lightsaber combat systems. They knew their stuff basically, and were far from inexperienced developers. Raven weren't ones to push beyond genre boundaries, but they consistently delivered great quality games. They clearly knew what worked and didn't work when designing something, and created very lean and very effective ‘worksman’ video games with some brilliant little flourishes of design when they were needed. Seriously, the pure fun of Jedi Academy’s lightsaber fighting (with the fix to restore full limb dismemberments of course) has yet to be beaten and that game came out in 2003.
Where’s Raven Software now? They have been in Call of Duty servitude since 2011, exclusively working on that perpetual-unto-the-heat-death-of-the-universe franchise exclusively for their brutal Activision overlords who purchased them all the way back in 1997. It’s like assigning a talented, veteran watch maker to mass produce Mickey Mouse children's watches. Yeah they're still doing the work and in business, but it’s just sad to see all the same. Thanks Activision, you soulless automatons.
By 2004 they were known for primarily FPS’s of various violence levels with only their first two games of Black Crypt and Shadowcaster being the RPG outliers in their catalogue, and so their decision to make a Marvel licensed RPG based on the uncanny mutants the public hates and fears was a strange one on the surface. On top of that, they had never done a console release before; they were exclusively a PC developer. The reason they decided to make such a two-way strange move? Because why not?
Cyclops blasts the Sentinel on the ground. Storm lightning bolts it. Wolverine slashes it in the crotch for some reason. Nightcrawler? He stands there and watches. Germans.
According to an early preview in Game Informer #119 from 2003, Raven simply wanted to step outside their comfort zone and do something they hadn't done yet, and simultaneously also make their first console game. Much like Neversoft with 2000’s Spider-Man they learned their bosses at Activision, who of course are inhuman necromancers wearing the guises of men to deceive souls and gain power, had the Marvel license. Some of the team were X-Men fans, so they shot their shot and got approved. That Game Informer article revealed a lot of surprising things about the early steps of X-Men Legends, one being that it was first envisioned as a turn-based RPG like Final Fantasy. This definitely hadn’t been done before, and Raven thought that it would help sell what their core vision of the game was, capturing the ‘teamwork’ ensemble element of the mutants. We came this close to a ‘four-dudes-standing-in-a-line’ X-Men game apparently. This version lasted for a decent amount of time, but the team ended up making a fundamental re-evaluation when they decided that players would want to actively control the various cool powers of the X-Men directly instead of simply watching canned animations play out, which is entirely correct. More action elements started making their way into the game concept, and eventually the team decided to make XML an isometric action-RPG styled after the console dungeon-crawlers before it, such as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath.
A fundamental idea Raven wanted to design the game around was a focus on teamwork, having the various X-People feel like they’re a well oiled combat armour equipped paramilitary force, which is also correct. This is a fundamental part of the group in the comic books afterall, they've always been an ensemble cast of eclectic characters. It sounds odd until you realize that the vast majority of X-Men games before this had been either beat em up’s or fighting games, and never really had the X-Men fighting together or feeling like a team. You’d mostly only be able to choose your choice of mutant freak- I mean, hero on a level-to-level basis, like in Capcom’s Mutant Apocalypse. The only previous games I can think of that had some element of the team working together were the early DOS PC games by Paragon Software (Madness in Murderworld and Fall of the Mutants) and the first X-Men on the Genesis. Those games had the ability to swap out your player character on the fly, so they at least had the illusion that Storm was always standing directly behind Cyclops at all times, ready to tag in to throw some hurricanes around. Oh wait, there was also Mutant Wars on the GBC that had live hero swapping, and X-Men: The Official Game on the GBA.
Perhaps we don't talk about those games.
In the end, Raven ended up with the final formula of XML; action-brawler combat with powers and brutal combo strings to deliver beatdowns on inferior humans with, and having a team of four X-Men at a time that players could dynamically swap between capturing that important core teamwork element of the source material.
Raven did another first for them when making this game; they collaborated on the storyline with someone else. The story here was crafted by Man of Action, a ‘supergroup' of sorts composed of writers from across the comic book world, including a few who had written for X-Men specifically. Man of Action went on from here to have a great career in the entertainment world, penning the concepts and writing for a whole swathe of mid 2000’s animated series and continuing into modern times. They would go on to write for such contemporary shows as Ben 10, Bakugan and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, as well as newer work like Sonic Prime and Ultimate Spider-Man (the DisneyXD show).
With all that out of the way, let's actually finally sit down and dominate over humans with our superior genetics in X-Men Legends. Like, imagine not having the ability to uncontrollably shoot concussive beams out of your eyes. Homo Sapiens, am I right?
A Legendary ARPG
Every version of this game is the same, other than the N-Gage, so thankfully which console I decided to use for the review doesn't matter (this will get very complicated later on this gen for some games). For this review, I used the Xbox version purely for its sharper visuals.X-Men Legends is, like I said earlier, an entry in the ‘slap everything that moves, and also spend your stat points’ genre. You play as the X-Men, who if you don't know who they are by now at least on a conceptual level I applaud you.
The game opens with the Brotherhood of Mutants, the bad mutants, attempting to kidnap a young and sassy Alison Crestmere who just discovered her lava creating powers and her accompanying status as an X-Gene possessor. This attempt is thwarted by the X-Men of course, which leads to her hanging around the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning for a while, getting hit on by Iceman a lot before eventually joining the team. Alison frames the story, with the game proceeding as you doing away missions as the X-Men interspersed with time playing as her walking around the Xavier Institute and taking in the sights, talking to the various weirdos within the grounds. Alison eventually takes the codename Magma and joins the mission roster proper, but that's a pretty fair way into the game.
Yeah, we get it Jean. Phoenix this, Phoenix that, Phoenix Force.
Raven and Man of Action decided to create a new canon for this game, picking and choosing characters and elements to make a storyline untethered to any established lore or continuity. This was a very smart decision; comics are always a nightmare of continuity, but everyone's favourite paramilitary mutant squad especially so. XML is almost like a ‘greatest hits’ of X-Men stuff, taking a bunch of traditional X ideas and combining them together; the public hates and fears mutants, there's anti-mutant politics, the Xavier Institute has a hidden hangar for the teams stealth jet capable of going anywhere in the world located below the baseball field, you know. It's mainly based on the perennial and iconic Uncanny X-Men era lore, but there's some other twists thrown in there from time to time from more modern eras such as the equally famous 90’s Claremont/Lee run.
The missions range from you from battling the classic era Brotherhood, smashing through the Canadian Weapon X facility that gave Wolverine his added 300lbs of toxic metal weight as the Summers’ brothers, slapping gross Morlocks around in the sewers like the lower-rung mutants they are, dealing with one of my favourite X-Villains of the Shadow King, thrashing a whole lot of military soldiers around who refuse to accept mutant superiori- I mean, are unfortunately caught doing their job, and eventually go through an adapted version of the Asteroid M event. It was a great decision to not give a **** about canon, especially for certain characters here; Colossus was dead at this point in the comics, and particularly Alison Crestmere/Magma is an absolute nightmare of continuity and retcons in the comic source material. There were no less than I think four true identity/dominant personality retcons with her in the New Mutants series? And let's not even talk about New Roma. She came out great in this game by being an entirely normal teenager, basically, untied to any previous mess of continuity.
This story formula is great, and it helps serve as a great introduction for newcomers into the world of X-Men, something Raven purposefully wanted to do. By talking to the eclectic ensemble around the mansion as Alison between missions you find out about all the classic X-Whatever elements like what a mutant even is (they're mutants, not mutates). It really works as a good first exposure to the team, on top of having things in there for already compromised and brain-rotted comic lunatics like me.
Something else the game plays around with in terms of source material is the costumes of the characters. The default look of most of the X-People is taken directly from the Ultimate line of comics, which were the hottest **** in the 2004 Marvel comic world, let me tell you. This was allegedly a mandate from Marvel according to this IGN interview with game lead Rob Gee which I can believe as they also did something similar for the Fox movies, and likely wanted synergy across different X-media at the time. It's all black leather, mandatory-for-the-girls halter tops (Xavier really likes those belly buttons apparently) and yellow accents, huge boots and bracers and ‘X’ branded buckles.
Of course there's some characters who weren't in the Ultimate comics yet by 2004, such as Emma Frost and Gambit as well as numerous villains you battle. For these characters, their appearances are more in line with their classic looks, with some Raven liberties taken. Nightcrawler looks like a combination of an Ultimate black leather mixed with his classic shoulder pads and red chest accents for example, while Emma Frost is in something mostly resembling her New X-Men look, just with functional looking pants.
But enough ramblings about comic continuity and silly things like ‘storyline’ and ‘characterizations’, let’s start talking about the ‘slapping the living hell out of everything’ bit.
Some of the boss fights can be some real ordeals, like this evil shadow version of Avalanche towards the last half of the game.
X-Men Legends sees you command four X-Members to commit aggravated slapping with. You can play solo obviously and dynamically switch between your team using the d-pad directions, or in some configuration of local co-op of up to four players. Being an action-RPG, each character has four powers; two offensive powers, one buff or boost power (usually defensive in nature), and then their big screen clearing X-Treme power that deals massive damage but can only be used when you've picked up enough special bits enemies sometimes explode into. A character also has an assortment of passive abilities you can also put points into, with some of these being very impactful and what helps set a character apart from others, like Nightcrawler's teammate saving Leap of Faith ability. The X-People have four stats that define the usual parts of their character; Strike being their melee damage, Agility being their defence, Body being their health, and Focus being their energy pool (used for powers). You give enemies osmium-fisted haymakers or mentally assault them with telepathic barrages to defeat them, then get XP and level up. Simple, pure.
As an action game, you have some tools here to play with outside the powers. There’s two attack buttons; a light attack, and a heavy knockback attack, and combining them into various specific strings is the meat of the combat system. You can do something like Light-Heavy-Light to trip enemies so you can maybe get a ground pound attack on them before they can get back up, or Light-Light-Heavy to knock them up into the air to juggle them with a power or some aerial strikes. You can also grab and throw most enemies around to change it up, or throw Wolverine at said enemies instead with Colossus or Rogue, the famous fast ball special.
The roster covers just about every X-Person you could ever want to slap enemies with, and has all the real heavy hitters.
Stats are really impactful I find in the game because of how integral they are to the various calculations involved behind the scenes linked to each of them. Even just a few points into a character’s Strike will have a noticeable melee damage increase for example. This makes your choice of where you put stat points when a character levels up just as important as how you spend your power points, which I think is great. ARPGs can sometimes be more dominated by your choice of powers rather than stats, with only a few I find achieving a balance between the two of them; to me, XML is one of these games.
Character wise, Raven did a great job at making each of the playable characters feel unique from one another within the simple framework, and most importantly each of them feels accurate to the all important power fantasy. Colossus feels like a true metal behemoth as you pummel enemies with sonic claps and huge haymakers while (very slowly) lumbering forward, while Storm calls down cracking lightning strikes from a distance and summoning windstorms in-between. Beast, my beloved blue sometimes-cat furry, shreds through enemies with his melee strings and spinning handstand kicks while Nightcrawler does just a whole lot of bamf-ing around. Jean Grey has the unique ability to levitate and toss around enemies and objects with her telekinesis. It just feels great to get in there and hit your buttons, which is a very good thing for a game like this. This I think is Legends’ greatest strength; it's just fun to play.
X-Men has to have some of the most convoluted character lore and retcons in the comic world. Case in point: Psylocke. That's a very abridged retelling in this screenshot.
Each character has some little touch that makes them feel cool basically, and I think they’re pretty well balanced with everyone being useful in some way. Iceman may lack the direct offensive blasting powers of someone like Cyclops, but his ice beams have the amazing utility of slowing down or outright freezing enemies for other characters to take out easier. Even Jubilee, whose powers are the butt of every ‘worst X-Man joke’ has value here, confusing enemies with her trademark fireworks and sticking her tongue out at them which I guess lowers their attack damage; no one likes getting made fun of by a small teenage girl. Some are of course more directly and immediately effective like Storm, who is likely the best character in the game just by the way, but you can get through the game with any of the characters in the end.
There’s also an item system, with three different types of gear able to be equipped to characters. There’s a variety of effects they can give, from simple stat boosts to unique items having some funkier gimmicky bonuses. They can be pretty effective depending on the character and item in question, but I wouldn’t say more so than your character's stats and powers. You can find them dropped by enemies occasionally, or buy them from the store you can access from any extraction point, which is both a save point and where you can swap your characters around.
Speaking of swapping characters around, I think Raven deserves some praise for the team building dynamics they fit in here. The game was fundamentally designed with one key strategy to build on the ‘teamwork’ aspect they wanted to capture; different characters have different ways they can interact with the environment in order to progress through the levels. Jean or Rogue can fly, letting them get over gaps or pits that a character like Colossus could not, but Piotr can also just entirely wreck walls with his Might ability, so. Since each of these different little level interactions are present throughout the game, whether they are mandatory to solve some environmental puzzle or just to make progression easier somehow, it makes you think more about what mutant you want to bring with you, or making you try a new character when you need to swap to someone who can weld something closed. It’s small things like this that add up when talking about a genre as simple as the brawler ARPG, and once again makes characters feel unique within that simple framework.
The game can be hard, especially in the beginning when you don't have many powers yet and haven't built up your very important stats. There's no blocking ability in this game though the enemies can block you because they ****ing cheat, and they can also deal pretty high damage to you if they surround you which they will. Enemies also are frequently resistant to a certain damage type, making you have to swap around heroes to deal with potentially and it can get a little hectic once the fights get going. The game isn't insurmountable by any means though, and with some levels and by making smart character and power choices you can make X-Men Legends bow to your superiority.
The RGP side of the game is simple, but effective involving passive abilities and tiered powers to bash things in the face with.
There’s a lot of content crammed in here. The story alone is easily about 14 hours or so, and that's not even considering the optional stuff with the graded Danger Room courses. There’s a PvP multiplayer mode you can play from the main menu if you ever want to abuse Gambit with never ending optic blasts. Just me? There's even a purely for fun mode where you can play as various goons and supervillains in survival type missions across various levels. Ever wanted to play as a Sentinel and Mystique battling Jubilee and some faceless military guys in the Morlock sewers? Well, have fun, Raven thought about you.
Through talking to characters at certain points in the mansion as Alison, you can sometimes unlock ‘flashback’ Danger Room simulations on top of it all. These are fun little challenges with a locked team based around some previous era of X-Men lore or some specific event. You can battle a rampaging Juggernaut in the X-Mansion as the original ‘first class’ lineup, complete with Jean’s iconic Marvel Girl outfit and Beast’s non-furry state, or break out of the Weapon X facility as a feral Wolverine with his weird helmet thing.
Now is time for the glazing up of X-Men Legends to end. Do I have complaints? A few, it's not a perfect game.
Lack of a ‘respec’ option for your heroes is kind of a bummer, even one you have to pay for somehow. There’s a couple times I made an oopsie with someone's powers that I wish I could have undone, like thinking Iceman’s icicle throwing power was actually worth putting any points into. It makes experimenting discouraged which is odd in an ARPG like this. I also think the characters need more powers to play around with; being locked to only two specific offensive powers and a single boost every time is a little limiting. They all feel pretty great, other than Iceman's icicle shards, but I wish there were more of them, and you'd get to choose which ones you want to use and put points into.
This is partly the main contributor to my biggest complaint of the game; the characters feel pretty locked ‘build’ wise, due to having set-in-stone powers. There's no room to try something new on Storm, or Wolverine, or Jubilee for example since you only have the same exact powers to level up every time. Some weirdos I think have a little more viable options for how you play them, like Iceman being able to become a surprisingly good melee brawler through some of his powers if you wanted to, but the majority feel very much ‘mono-build’. There’s only one way to play Storm, or one way to play Cyclops. If there were more (read: any) power choices to choose from, this would I think be much improved overall. The game is still of course fun to play and well executed so I think it gets away with it ultimately, but I wish there was more there in that regard. I like this game so much I want more, damnit; it's a backwards compliment, really.
There are also a few minor but wonky bugs and rough edges here and there. A few power tooltips have typos or don't show the correct numbers sometimes, like Emma Frost’s last rank on her Psionic Strike/Fury passive. It does the correct damage when you take it, but the tooltip shows the numbers still from the previous rank. There's also a strange thing with the bosses and your X-Treme power gauge. Since most bosses are playable in that goofy special Danger Room mode, they respect the same rules as player characters; they have four powers, one being an X-Treme that slows down time and gets a name call-out on the screen like your X-Freaks. The jank here is they use your gauge to use this power, which is kinda hilarious to watch happen. They’re such dastardly villains that they steal your resources, I guess.
There’s also the inevitable repetition curse that's inescapable for games of this genre. Legends can get repetitive, as you are doing more or less the same ‘slapping everything that even breathes at you’ over and over again across a pretty long story campaign. I think it's a little better in this, given the team aspect and swappable characters; if you’re getting blase about Jean Grey, give Emma a go. It's also broken up pretty nicely by the Institute sections with Alison, so there's also that, and the varied mission settings and objectives can help spice it up. Like I’ve said a few times across my reviews, this is the kind of genre that you're either into and don't mind the repetition of, or you're not into and you get bored of.
Score And Final Thoughts
Score: 8/10 X-GenesX-Men Legends overall is a fantastic X-Game, one of the greats. Its RPG systems are simple but effective, its brawling combat is fun and easy enough for anyone's younger brother to be able to pick up a second controller and start throwing down with. The playable characters are an X-Men fan's dream, and all feel authentic and fun to slap things with. The game is made with a lot of love, filled with tiny details and fandom touches, and it has plenty of content to get your money’s worth out of. Any game that lets you play as Rogue and Beast is good in my books. Just me? Now if only Forge was in this game…
Eh, he's not playable but I'll still take it. **** yeah, Forge.
What's next for the retrospective? Why, this game's 2005 sequel, X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse. XML2 has you slap the hell out of everyone's favourite purple-lipped mutant “god”, with more playable characters like Juggernaut, and Bishop, and Sunfire and Iron Ma- sorry, I got ahead of myself there. You'll have to wait.
Until next time.
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