X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

So I've been playing this game for about a week or so. It's a cool mix between hack&slash RPG (Diablo style) and comix. It's a little addictive (I must admit). So let's get down with the pros and cons of this game:




Pros:

• Lots of characters to play with, right from the beginning (X-Men party and Brotherhood) + 3 unlock-able characters
• Characters have each lots of upgradable super-powers (at the higher levels, are very powerful and very cool to watch)
• Engaging story (yes, it's the old: the bad-guys are almost winning, do your best and save the world kind of stereotype, and the missions are all like: get that and put it there/go there and destroy that, that and that... with little variation of course). Even if stereotype, it's kind of interesting to see where would the plot go
• Nice comix like graphics, cool explosions and spell-effects (aka super-powers), very-very-good voice-acting, highly destructible environments, very cool animations, characters and villains. Bosses are well designed, though, some of them are a little disappointing (at least for me). The level design is very good and somehow varied (it's nicely themed but varied)
• AI of your party is satisfying. Auto-healing is cool. Temperament selections for your party-characters is also a good thing. Auto-spell and auto-equipment management are very good if you don't really want to waste your game tuning your characters
• All the characters evolve over time even if you don't play with them. A cool feature because you don't have to play some fixed party to optimize your experience points...
• Extra-content: artwork, original comix drawings, training sessions & exams, etc.
  

Cons:

• Right from the beginning, the controls seem dumb. KP4 and KP6 are your main attack buttons and W, A, S, D for movement. Special powers are stupid combinations of KP5 and KP4, KP6, E and [Space]. I mean, how do you come with these controls? Accessing some other power? No problem: B + 1, 2...0. Simple as that! :( There are also combos: KP4-KP6-KP4 combinations, but it's very hard to do one if you press them too rapidly or too slow. You need something like 500ms delay between pressing each key (and hold that for about 200ms). It's stupid!
• The stash, upgrades and buy/sell screen and party-management parts suffer from lots of control bugs! A mouse click doesn't always select that particular option, a up/down key could move the cursor way past the desired option, sometimes keys don't seem to work at all... Dumb-dumb-dumb!
• In good-old-Diablo-hack'n'slash-classic-RPG style, you have tons of enemies to kill and doesn't seem like you're really evolving, because of this stupid system: enemies evolve and give more experience points when you kill them, but no worry, because you need more-and-more experience points to advance your level. So, you'll always have the same fights, because of the constant distance the computer sets between your party and your opponents
• The camera sits in a high position to better catch your party smashing enemy's forces. But sometimes it's pretty annoying hiding your active member from your view behind a wall or something. It's true, that when your party approaches a certain obstacle, that particular object becomes transparent (and you don't always realize why your character takes a particular trajectory apart from a straight line :) )
• Breaking different objects throughout the level will sometimes reward you with money or objects that you can wear or sell. But it doesn't seem to follow any design pattern and always come in great-great numbers, so you can successfully fill your time with'em

It's a good title and if you like comix it will get you. It is well designed, beautiful graphics and a little flashy, lots of characters and things to do and let's not forget: addictive game mechanics. It's definitely worth a 9.

Gamespot X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse review.