Heres my modest review for Legen- wait for it - dary. Another Spark Unlimited First Person Shooter for casual gamers.
Their last outing was the harshly criticized Turning Point : Fall Of Liberty which received a 4.5 from Gamespot and a 6 from me. I defended it as an old school corridor crawler. That had some poor design choices and technically glitches, It was short and somewhat unsatisfying but it was far from unplayable.
This time around Legendary does offer many improvements, but it is done in by some incredibly frustrating moments. of game play and two levels which serve more to establish the mood of the game than offer up any challenging game play. Woody Allen once commented that the food here is terrible and served in such small portions, and that sums up legendary pretty well.
The graphics and story are much improved this time around theirs a wider selection of weapons but that is irrelevant since the Axe is one of the best and most useful weapons in the game. Hit detection still seems off even with the Axe. The health system makes some sense this time around with you siphoning off the life energy from the various creature this time around. Enemies are made up of mythological creature and human soldiers from the Black Order a secret society that once to control Pandora's box.
The set pieces are great but the variety of enemies and objectives are limited most often they include finding three of something. and the environments while not as boring as the typically WW2 battlefield. Seem fairly limited consisting of wrecked buildings and sewers. There is also a subways, A graveyard in London and the roof of the British parliament before we head back to New York to destroy the Black Order Tower. This is something of a theme it seems in Spark Unlimited games as Turning Point began in New York and went to London only making a brief stop over in Washington DC. Its a path and frankly reminds me of a side scrolling beat em up kill enemies move forward, kill more enemies. All without the aid of a giant flashing hand. Although you can press the left stick in and a marker will tell you which direction your supposed to head in.
The music is top notch once again and the story sets itself up for a sequel, which honestly I would like top see since the game has a lot of potentially that might be best served by making a more polished game. That being said I like the fact that Spark Unlimited's IP Makes games of some originality. If not for some truly frustrating enemy encounters "Legendary" would surly rate better from me. Rent this game first.
Let me leave you with a description of the Kraken Boss encounter You are on the roof of the British parliament you have rocket launcher and a big enemy ahead of you. Running around you wait for the missile to lock on to a tentacle then you fire The mouth opens and you fire inside. Then you run over and blast his other tentacle and then fire into the mouth some more. Repeat until its dead. It felt fairly old school while a was playing it, it became incredibly frustrating as while running to retrieve more ammo (you can only carry 4 rockets at a time) I was repeatedly hit by a giant tentacle which instantly killed me. Making me start over again and again and again. When I finally managed to kill it I can't say that I felt rewarded, it certainly wasn't as rewarding as killing a minotaur or a griffin. And thats what I'm left to think about the game is that often times its just not that rewarding.
It was a better effort than their last outing but it still comes up short. Hopefully the team at Spark continues to make unique first person shooters and improve upon their efforts in doing so because for all the negative reviews and low scores their are still people who appreciate their effort at doing so.