X-Men Legends II Rise of Apocalypse Review (Xbox)
Raven Software built a solid foundation with X-Men Legends, now they've built a cosy, promising home on top of it. Even if there's some wiring problems...
Developer: Raven Software
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: Xbox, PC & GameCube; 14th October 2005 (PAL), 20th September 2005 (NA). PlayStation 2; 7th October 2005 (PAL), 20th September 2005 (NA). PSP; 25th November 2005 (PAL), 19th October (NA)
Platforms: Xbox, PS2, GameCube, PSP, PC, N-Gage.
In 2004, Raven Software released their superhero RPG dungeon crawler X-Men Legends which was widely met with high praise from both fans and critics alike for its story, gameplay and its 4-player superhero team-up system that would change how superhero games work. One year later, Raven Software released its sequel; Rise of Apocalypse.
The X-Men and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants are forced to work together as the first mutant Apocalypse plans to take over the world, having kidnapped Magneto’s children Quicksilver and Polaris as well as Xavier. Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Storm bust into a military facility to save Xavier, flee to Genosha and devise a plan to stop the mad tyrant Apocalypse. Meanwhile, he’s strapped Quicksilver and Polaris along with Emma Frost and Sabretooth into a machine that’ll grant him tremendous power. As if he wasn’t already incredibly powerful. To aid him are his four horsemen; Angel, Abyss, Mikhail Rasputin and Holocaust who then cause more problems for the X-Men with standard bossfights. The plot is all pretty servicable and straightfoward and it’s really all you need. Stop the bad guys from controling the world. But in its simplicity it can be a detriment to itself as the horsemen are not memorable at all. They always seem to slip my mind no matter how many times I play this. They just don’t seem to stick out. Angel is the most notable horseman of Apocalypse but the others I guess I’m just not so well versed in, although they don’t do them any favours in this either by not doing anything particular to make them stand out.
The game sees you adventure all across the world of the X-Men from the jungles of the Savage Land, to New York, its sewers and a destroyed X-Mansion, the Weapon X facility in Canada, Mr Sinister’s labs, and of course Egypt for the final showdown with Apocalypse. There’s some nice variety amongst where you get to visit and they’re all visually distinctive, but sometimes it can feel like you’re overstaying your welcome in these claustrophobic places. The layout of the levels are much too drawn out.
X-Men Legends II also expands upon a lot from the previous game, starting with characters. Unfortunately, Jubilee, Psylocke, and the previous game’s main protagonist Magma all got cut loose. Beast and Emma Frost are still around but are no longer playable due to plot reasons, though in their absence they’ve thrown in some more for you to play with. Your returning playable characters are Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, Rogue, Gambit, Colossus, Iceman, and Nightcrawler. Your new playable characters are Bishop, Juggernaut, Magneto, Scarlet Witch, Toad, and Sunfire. You can also unlock Deadpool and Professor X (who was playable in the last game but only in the Astral plane) and special guest character Iron Man, who is unlocked by finding all of his armour pieces throughout the game and completing little levels, which cleverly are each individually laid out in the shape of X M E N. There are also console exclusive characters as well; PSP had Cable, Cannonball, Dark Phoenix, and X-Man while the PC version had Sabretooth and Pyro. The N-Gage version did see Beast as a playable character, however. In assembling your team of characters, if you pick a particular group, you get an added bonus. For example if you pick Magneto, Toad, Juggernaut, and Scarlet Witch you get an exp bonus as the Brotherhood of Mutants. Choose Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler you get the New X-Men with a health bonus.
X-Men Legends had a very good and simplistic levelling up system seeing you unlock new powers along the way. Here they’ve built upon that a lot more. There are so many other powers you can unlock for your characters as well as support boosts for leadership skills granting more combo xp, higher defence, critical hits, and support for powers such as higher energy recovery rate, teleportation powers have a higher critical hit chance, greater slashing damage, optic beam damage, and so forth. Holding R and pressing A or B on the Xbox controller you can use whichever assault power registered, X for defencive or support power, and Y for your grand super powered room clearing finisher, of which you now get multiples to choose from for most characters, some who have super support powers now. It can be either blast everyone in the room with lightning or boost everyone’s stats higher. Because of the increase of powers available at your disposal you can not only assign powers in the level up menu, but in game while holding R and pressing any direction on the d-pad adjacent to the face buttons you can cycle through your powers on the fly.
They’ve expanded upon loot for each character. Every character can equip an item for boots, body, and accessory that can boost any one of your stats or power up your character’s mutant abilities or powers. There is only so much you can carry on you, however, and some items can only be equipped when your character is at a certain level or character specific items. But no matter about hoarding items. Speaking to Forge you can store any items you want in the storage box or sell weaker items you don’t want for bits. Bits can used in exchange for goods and services with Forge attaining new equipable items, or purchasing level ups, power points, or resetting power points. You can also attain bits by defeating enemies and smashing items in a level. For each level up or powerpoint however, it gets more and more expensive. It’s like microtransactions except less scammy.
Gameplay is a ton of fun, although I think a little imbalanced in parts. Controlling the characters is fantastic and so satisfying. Everyone feels uniquely different and it’s a joy using their powers. No one feels like they’ve had less thought or effort put into developing them over another character. Each character is great to play as and it is a lot of fun beating up the bad guys with them. There’s a greater mix of combos you can do juggling between A and B attacks resulting in stuns, air launches, or trips. You can combine mutant powers to gain a little more exp and damage boost too. The imbalance I feel comes from difficulty. If you’ve been playing on normal difficulty for about 3 play throughs (you can start a new game carrying over stats from the previous game) you don’t get as much exp anymore so it takes forever to level up. So putting it up to hard you get enemies that match your levels and some more exp that you really need. But when you reach the Savage Land there is a spike in enemy difficulty and their levels exceed yours by about 10 making it harder to defeat these grunts because you don’t have strength enough to beat them and making things a bit harder to level up. At this point for me most of my characters are level 56-60. Some enemies I’m facing are level 74. I know I’m on a harder difficulty now so the enemies would be tougher and there would be a greater challenge, but you still need to keep things somewhat level. Even with some of my much stronger characters I’m having trouble keeping my guys alive and eating through my health and power vials. Just need a little more exp and strength to give me an edge. Although, there are cheats such as god mode and maximum level to speed things up.
Another imbalance with gameplay I feel comes from how much you do and explore in the levels. It’s great you have a lot to do, time to spend here, and bad guys to beat, but there is a little bit too much of enemy bashing and wandering around long, long halls with not much going on in some areas, and with save points few and far between exploring sometimes. If you get desperate, you can open up a Blink portal from the pause menu to go back to the hub location to sell off loot or save, but I feel like the levels should have been trimmed down just a little bit more. Because of that, it makes the game feel longer than it actually is.
The Xbox version is also known to some bugs and crashes. If you have too many items on you or in storage with Forge, it becomes too much for the console’s memory to handle and after a time it’ll crash the game giving you a nasty EEEEEEEEEEE. You also get this crash if you’ve not been picking up items around the levels. So the easiest work around to this is to make sure you pick up everything that you can that enemies drop or spawns out from item chests and sell all that you don’t need as soon as you’re able. There is no sense in keeping a hold of an item that might be useful later. It won’t be. Stop hoarding stuff and get rid of it. And that item that’s level 60 usable only? Useless. You’re not going to be able to use it anytime soon. Sell it. You’ll get something better when your characters do reach level 60. Your only hope here then is if you pick up an item better than what you’re already using, or save up your bits as much as possible to level up your characters more, or buy better items. Until then you need to keep as much space as free as possible in your inventory on you (you can only hold 20 items at a time) and in Forge’s storage (which holds 60 items total).
In the end, I think the good far outweighs the bad for X-Men Legends II and what problems this game has end up getting fixed for Raven’s next game with Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The Xbox version may crash due to silly memory issues but it has an easy fix. Level layouts may drag on more than they should and harder difficulties might make things a little tedious. But it is still a solid and ambitious sequel to a very, very good game. It improved on so much from X-Men Legends and built upon that foundation further adding more of what you can do with each X-Man as well as giving you more of them to play with. It lets you dive deeper into the X-Men world with unique conversations between particular characters, trivia questions to answer to earn more exp, a wealth of costumes to switch between, and plenty enough to unlock. It looks amazing with an accurate comic book cel-shaded look making it all look like a comic dungeon crawler. The voice cast is fantastic too. With so many characters to play as and teams to want to use, as well as leveling up your characters to be as strong as possible, it beckons replayability. Despite its numerous flaws, X-Men Legends II is easily one of the most enjoyable and best Marvel and X-Men games available, I always return back to it when I get the urge, and it’s an important game in the lead up to Ultimate Alliance in terms of progress made developing this unique 4-player superhero dungeon crawler. If Ultimate Alliance could get a sequel on the Switch then surely Legends deserves another sequel too. Although in today’s game dev climate that is a huge order to ask for…
Where to Purchase (as of 150/04/24):
Ebay: £5.49 - £50 / $7.26 - $180
Amazon: £11.49 - £65 / $27.95 - $47.19
CeX: £4 - £12
This game was sooooo amazing! I remember playing it for hours and hours. Also, the next game in this "series" also quite sweet and has an amazing cutscenes (for 2006 of course 😅)