Legendary – The worst thing to happen to mythical creatures since sparkling vampires.

On Friday I went out for a walk with my girlfriend and ended up renting Legendary, as being fresh off of my Disgaea 3 conquest, I needed something with a little more movement and I figured why not get a simple action game. There was a deal on, so I got Bioshock as well and holy crap, am I happy I did, because after playing Legendary for about 8 hours not only had I had enough of the game, but I’d also beaten it. Unfortunately, the game’s length did nothing to keep it from wearing out it’s welcome a touch prematurely.

To my dismay when I got home, Legendary was not an action game, but another FPS, not that you could tell from the back of the box (I suppose the guy on the front with the gun should’ve tipped me off, but lots of action games have them so I just went with it). But anyway, I began, not knowing what to expect and trying to keep an open mind even as the opening cutscene skipped around like a CD cleaned with steel wool. Afterwards, I discovered that the dank aesthetic of the previous cinematic seizure was to be with me for the whole experience, so I settled in for the long haul and here I am, ready to sink my teeth into the jugular of this legendary mess.

Lets start off on what got to me the most, the game’s individuality and creativity, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The overall design is bland and extremely shallow, utilising many shades of brown, grey and browny greyish. Gritty textures blanket the cramped environments, except whenever you’re inside a building, in which the rocks and mud are replaced by a dirty, shiny metallic glint. Lighting effects are poor at the best of times, save for a few moments where the programmers were actually awake, and only flatten the already dull presentation. That being said, there were moments when the game’s atmosphere got so intense that I forgot what I was playing and started to enjoy myself, only to be yanked back into reality seconds later as I turned the corner to find another bleak attempt at a setting. These mere moments (ironically the most enjoyable part of the game) are something that really annoyed me, because it showed what the entire game could’ve been if the effort had been put forth. I feel very conflicted ripping this game apart because I know that there is potential here, but it’s crippled by inconsistency, the mood shifting from wow back to irritated almost instantly.

The levels larger than the sewers or the several underground paths the game makes you traverse are littered with so much debris that it turns what should be some room for you to manoeuvre around into yet another tight corridor. These are usually far worse than the tunnels because at least in the tunnels, you know you’re trapped. Out in the “open”, the crap strewn about is always low to the ground, allowing you to see some free space, but never allowing you to access it because of your insanely short jump height. Also bland and repetitive are the enemies, having little by way of texture and even less in colour. More dull, flat shades of grey and brown to endlessly massacre, only highlighted by splotches of red and blue once the bullets do their thing. And to make matters worse, the selection of uninspired enemies is shorter than the aforementioned bunny hops. There are 12 types of enemies in the game, and that’s if you’re lenient. One is just a sac that spawns a different enemy, 2 are just harder versions of weaker enemies, and one is just a tentacle that occasionally comes out of nowhere and pretty much instantly kills you. So if you want to be picky, there’s actually only 8 different enemies in the entire game, and that still includes the only boss!

Now that I think about it, the non-existent colour palette is the least of Legendary’s problems, because the game could look like a clown college reject and it’d still be an artistic atrocity. Simply put, the graphics are not next gen. Legendary might (barely) make a list of PS2 games with good graphics, but off the top of my head I can think of several last generation games that look much better. The first thing that comes to mind is Black, which I thought about several times as I plodded on through another legendary sewer. Black was absolutely stunning. It was shiny, had great character models, was quite colourful even for a game with a lot of dark areas, and was still able to throw in a few levels full of grit. On top of that, I’ve yet to see a game with better explosions, which it handed out frequently with a smile. Even something like God of War 2, which isn’t supposed to have ultra realistic people, comes off feeling more human than the embarrassing characters of Legendary. Yes, Kratos, god of war, body and mind comparable to that of a brick shithouse, is more human than the guy from Legendary (I can’t even remember his name, and I just turned the game off).The weaponry, while having some nice gun designs, also leaves much to be desired being as bland as the scenery. You can’t imagine my distaste as the game still chugged under the graphics’ minimal weight.

All this and I haven’t even touched the story or gameplay, which are about as appealing as the already trampled over graphical fortitude. The game is about a guy, still can’t recall the name, who is tricked into opening Pandora’s box and receives a mark on his arm for doing so. When the box was opened, mythical creatures were released into the world and begin to wreak havoc. The guy who sent the main character to open it wants to use the box to control the monsters for some unexplained reason, presumably for world domination or another cliché. Once you get to the end the story attempts to wrap up, but stumbles into something that feels nothing like closure. The story is bad as is to be expected in a game that finishes before really getting started, but pacing is not the only issue. It’s boring, predictable, and I’m quite sure half-assed. I had no idea why I was in each level because I just couldn’t be bothered, you never feel drawn into it and the execution is poor throughout. And yes, I know I wrote like 3 paragraphs on how pissed I was that it’s all brown and 3 sentences on the plot but what do you expect given what I’m working with? I’m sure if I was reviewing a book with no pictures than I have significantly less thoughts on the palette and much more in terms of story, but as it stands Legendary is about as deep as my admiration for it.

And now the gameplay, oh dear god the gamepley. Legendary is not a fun game, and the moments that it goes from crap to halfway decent are not worth the uphill battle. The only things legendary does right are the things that can be said about most shooters, such as a few strips where you can either run in guns blazing or hang back and snipe everyone, and the fact that when you kill someone, the animation of them falling over is quite impressive, all feeling very real. This of course can only be said of the human enemies, since the monsters don’t take cover, and more often than not will unsatisfyingly blow up when you kill them. Come to think about it, I would have enjoyed the game much more if all of the monsters had been taken out, because I only ever enjoyed fighting the humans. This is probably due to the fact that the opposing army seems to have a limit to how many soldiers they can afford to waste on you, which leads us into a much more spiteful list of things that the game does wrong.

Yes, probably the worst thing about the game is that unless the goal is to clear out the room of enemies, than all the monster types will endlessly re-spawn, which should be illegal. Even while attempting the jumping “puzzle” in the second stage, you will have the same werewolf chewing on your ass every time you fall down, and then again once you make it back up. Just to make getting around with a room full of enemies that will never stop coming at you even more irritating, anything bigger than the 1 foot tall fairies will inevitably gang up on you and force you into a corner, rendering you unable to move as they rip you apart. And just to make matters worse, when anything with claws attacks you, for example every friggin’ werewolf in the game, you get big red claw marks across your screen, which stack with each attack by each enemy. This will effectively blind you, as you are made mincemeat out of by three or four identical baddies, again. And mincemeat you shall become, because if you aren’t facing the very fragile fairies, the exploding bugs or the squishy soft humans then you will most likely have to empty an entire clip into even a single unit of the endless horde of werewolves before it dies. Seriously, I've never shot at anything so much in my entire life and felt like it’d done absolutely nothing, and as you progress your ammo becomes less and less effectual. The worst instance is when facing a minotaur, which can take about 50 shotgun shells to the face before going down, and that’s if you’ve been hurling molotov cocktails at it during your reloading time. The only thing they did to try and remedy this was to make ammo slightly more obtainable than the inevitable rage that follows having to restart a section for the 8th time after werewolf clone number 458 chews your face off. Throughout the whole game I think I ran out of ammo 3 times, and that’s while mostly using the shotgun. The ground is littered with big glowing crates of ammo that don’t disappear until all the ammo it has to offer is gone, even in the most obscure places. With so much live ammunition lying around the city in museums and the sewer system, it seems the city has bigger problems than a few little monsters running amuck.

The only other gameplay mechanic I have any issue with (given how it is the only other mechanic in the game) is your health and the restoration of. You have a tiny little health meter, which doesn’t stand up well even to the 1-foot fairy attacks, and healing is a pain. It seems that the mark received by opening Pandora’s box has the ability to absorb what I can only assume are the monsters’ souls. You do this slooooowly. You can then use the soul energy to heal yourself a little bit, also done at a speed with just as many o’s. By the time you do get your health bar up to a liveable level, you’ve either lost health equivalent to what you restored, or are more mercifully dead. Because of this system, healing while fighting humans is impossible, as only monsters drop soul energy. As you can probably imagine, this leads to some complications. If there had been health packs laying around instead of this, I feel as if I would have had a much better time with Legendary, as you can quite easily be doing very well, and suddenly be dead before you know what’s gone on.

The verdict? Pass. Don’t rent it and for god sakes don’t buy it. Its playability is minimal, and a second run through is a definite no. I didn’t enjoy Legendary, and unless barely passable games are your forte, I doubt you would either. The only positive thing that came out of the experience is this review, and the knowledge that I can now play Bioshock instead.

-AtomicPineapple, August 24, 2009