Legendary: Xbox 360 Review

Posted February 11, 2009 by Joey in Reviews, Xbox 360.

For a game boasting the title ‘Legendary,’ you may be disappointed that it is not so legendary after all.  Legendary is the latest first person shooter from Atari and contains some of the most impressive, devastating scenes of horror and destruction on a very massive scale. But, in the end it delivers only a mildly pleasing shooter with hardly a story or main character, justifying the bold claims of FPS critics, in that you are merely a floating hand with a gun.

It is the end of the world as we know it when one super-secret organization goes up against another to open up a box.  Okay, so maybe there is, or I mean there should be more to the story than that, but that is all you get to go on.  Your main character is a museum relic stealing thief who can go through any locked door like James Bond with a paper clip. He ends up being suckered into opening up the “real” Pandora’s Box.  The story has no driving force as the main character, Deckard, is a total mute throughout the whole game.  You know nothing about this guy other than the fact that he stuck his hand in the box and got branded with a signet which you can use to regenerate your health and power up things.  So basically, you are playing as a human battery pack.  The focus is taken off of Deckard so thoroughly that your female counterpart, Vivian, has to do all of the narration of the story.

Legendary is completed in eight episodes that are not too long and relatively easy to navigate.  The controls allow you to use the D-pad to hold four weapons with only two of the buttons being interchangeable to pick up different guns.  Valves and keypads are abound throughout the game because of the emphasis placed on the fact that you are playing as a mute super secret art thief that can get out of any small confinement, man-made or otherwise.  So, foregoing any complex lock picking system, all you have to do is find the highlighted valve or keypad and hold a button down.  Of course, with the type of creatures you have to deal with, the simple unlocking systems come in very handy.

The creatures that get out of Pandora’s Box make this game very much worth playing.  This is where the game becomes situated between the massive and the miniscule.  You will feel small in this game once you watch a Golem crash through a skyscraper in New York and deal with a Kraken that is hell bent on consuming the Parliament building in London.  Legendary makes great use of the next generation graphics with these large scale creatures and immense scenes of chaos.

Where the game is lacking would be where you come in and have to deal with the small-scale crowd of enemies.  Soldiers will attempt to attack you and the AI is smart enough to run for cover when things are looking bleak.  The creatures are mostly made up of werewolves, firedrakes, laughing babies that sting you, and that tentacle thing from Star Wars that wrapped around Luke in the Death Star garbage disposal.  These things are fun to fight off, but I would think Pandora’s Box could use a little more variety in its ground troops.  Legendary would have been an awesome light gun arcade game as the action stays intense while you figure out what the weakness of each creature is.

The best part of Legendary is in the detailed and massive expanse of the graphics and environments.  It is bold enough to take on recreating Times Square, a wickedly awesome castle and the Palace of Westminster.  These are some of the best recreations I’ve seen in any game so far and the scenes of mass destruction and chaos is a fair mix between Godzilla and Independence Day.  You can also see the damage the creatures take when you unload on them.  The minor details pay off for this game.

Legendary is not a very long game in single player mode.  Depending on the difficulty, it may take you a whole night, or just several hours into the night to beat it.  I do have to praise this game for making the difficulty levels as hard as possible.  Heck, I died a lot on Easy.  The multiplayer is very solid as well due to its basic structure.  There is only one other game mode where you and your opponents must collect the energy mist that is left behind from killing werewolves.  What’s good about this is that the developers probably realized that the community was not going to be large enough online and you have a better chance at getting into a game with just one game type rather than sitting in a waiting lobby all day for a game of capture the briefcase in Perfect Dark Zero.

The best argument I can give for picking Legendary up is for the ease in which you can unlock most all of the achievements.  The majority of achievements are based in the single player mode and most of the secret achievements have to do with completing the episodes in the game.  Even the multiplayer achievements are easy to pick up as there is still a viable community that plays Legendary online.   Legendary is a solid overnight rental. Nothing worth buying though, as plenty of problems keep this from becoming an outstanding game.

Tagged as atari, Legendary, Pandora's Box