‘Member the Original Xbox?

I had a cousin gift me the original Xbox along with a large collection of games back when we were kids. Some of the games included were 007 Nightfire, Mortal Kombat: Deception and also the game I’ll be reviewing today and its sequel, X-Men Legends.

X-Men Legends released in 2004, was the first game developed by Raven Software, the same dudes that developed the Ultimate Alliance games. Of which, other than the 3rd instalment for the Nintendo Switch, I never had chance to play!

I recently played through the Xbox port, I never had chance to finish the game previously due to the disc being scratched to hell. Speaking of scratches. This scratched an itch for me being a massive comic book fan and this game being the definitive X-Men game. So let’s cover my thoughts on this classic.

The Plot of X-Men Legends

The story is pretty boilerplate as far as comic book games go, especially with X-Men media.

The game starts with a young mutant named Alison that is revealed to have lava based powers and is the victim of a kidnapping by the X-Men antagonists The Brotherhood.

In typical Brotherhood shenanigans they’re here to recruit her to the anti-human cause (shock).

Playing as Wolverine & Cyclops in the first level and tutorial of the game, your mission is to save Alison and subsequently bring her to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Alison is eventually given the codename Magma and trained by the X-Men to control her powers to save the world from Magneto’s Mr Burns style plan to block out the sun from the Earth.

Gameplay

Starting out as Wolverine and Cyclops in the first mission, you eventually unlock the rest of the X-Men including favourites such as Storm, Rogue, Nightcrawler and many more.

Missions are mostly linear, leading your team through groups of enemies carrying out objectives until eventually reaching a boss at the end before finishing up.

The hub world is Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, here you will play as Alison and interact with the other X-Men, spend your Techbits on gear from Forge or healing items from The Healer or train in Danger Room scenarios collected in game which helps to level up your characters.

You will build a team of 4 heroes all with different styles and abilities to progress through levels with. These can be changed at Xtraction points scattered throughout the game. Xtraction points are also used to revive any characters using Techbits that are collected from enemies and breakable objects.

Attacks & Enemies

Each hero has their light and strong attacks that be combined to stun and trip enemies. Each character also has four unique power attacks that can be used at the expense of your energy bar. Two power attacks will usually be strike based with a third power being a buff to enhance abilities. The fourth ability is an X-Treme power which will be used sparingly but are X-tremely powerful.

Enemies can range from basic grunts to enemies with resistances. Physical, Energy & Mental resistances mean that some characters will be ineffective against certain enemies.

The trick is to build a team that compliments each other. Whether you have a ranged fighter like Cyclops, somebody more physical like Rogue or Colossus or a support character like Emma Frost.

I personally stuck with a team of Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops and Rogue throughout the majority of the game. Up until I unlocked Psylocke late on and she became a fixture of my team. This leads me to one of my main gripes of the game.

Levelling Up

Throughout the game your characters all level up at the same time. This essentially gave me no reason to use characters other than the team I’d put together and gotten used to. So the likes of Jean Grey, Nightcrawler (one of my favourites in the comics) and Emma Frost were barely used.

However, I did appreciate the manual stat increases as it pushed you towards levelling your characters towards their strengths and well, if you didn’t then you’d certainly be punished. I learned this the hard way.

Stupidly, I was levelling characters the complete wrong way. For example, putting Striking ability into more ranged characters like Cyclops who were rarely going to use striking ability.

So when I got stuck in a level in which I couldn’t change team members or quit back to the hub world, I pretty much had to quit and start the game all over. So the game took me a little while longer than the average 16 hour completion time.

Unfortunately, my favourite character in X-Men comic history in Nightcrawler was done dirty in this game. I couldn’t seem to get the best out of his teleportation attacks.

Frustrations

Damn doorways! The amount of times I was playing as Wolverine just to have dumbass Iceman stood in a doorway firing off ranged attacks and blocking me from fighting enemies was unreal.

The game does get rather stale at times in terms of combat. It’s usually just beating 3 different types of enemy that are resistant to specific attacks.

For first time players, the game can be pretty difficult. I’ve discussed with users on Reddit who in the past struggled to make it past the first boss Mystique. Make use of those health packs! Luckily for me, I played through the intro mission around four times through either forgetting to save or having to start over!

Art Style

Cel-shading just doesn’t age. It simply doesn’t.

There wasn’t a point in the game in which I thought this game has aged badly. For a game developed in the early 2000s in still holds up really well.

Music

It’s not quite the theme music to the animated series! The music in the game tends to fit each level location. For example, there’s a mission late on in the Astral Plane that is very dark in tone and the music helps to emphasise that tone with low pitched drones.

On the other hand, there are missions in which you’re fighting Sentinels that’ll have high intensity music to match the rhythm of the button mashing you’re sure to be doing.

X-Men Legends – Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed X-Men Legends, why are these types of games in such short supply these days?

It was a really nostalgic playthrough made even more satisfying with the fact that I hadn’t finished it before. Playing Ultimate Alliance 3 a couple of years ago had me pining to play this game again.

With the simple, cel-shaded visuals, the satisfying feeling of the attacks and putting together your own super team. This game is up there as one of the greatest comic book video games.

I’m looking forward to playing the sequel Age of Apocalypse that was teased at the end of the first game. As well as the remaining Ultimate Alliance games from Raven Software.

Retro Rating – B

Let us know which other retro games you grew up playing and we’ll give them a go and let you know our thoughts!

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