Anyone who is a fan of Action/RPG should not miss this game. It has a great, lengthy story and it's a blast to play.
When you first start this game, it may actually look a little plain and straight-forward. Also the story may seem somewhat dull at first as well. But don't worry, it gets A LOT better. By the time you've played 5 hours of the game, you'll already be hooked. Once you've finally leveled your character up a few times, you'll start realizing the awesome powers each mutant possesses and how you can continue to upgrade those powers. Plus, the story gets very intense and you can’t wait to see where it leads to next.
The action the game provides is non-stop. Around every corner lurks another group of bad guys to dispatch. Of course you have your standard kick and punch button to use in battle, but also you can create interesting combos with just these two buttons. There are several combos to use, some of course are longer and harder to figure out than others. Even though the difficulty isn't very challenging most of the time, you'll still encounter a few enemies that can become a little frustrating sometimes, usually being the bosses at the end of a level.
When beginning a mission, you'll be able to select up to 4 X-Men in your party at once. Once you're in the mission, you can switch to any of these 4 X-Men at any time, as long as their energy isn't completely exhausted. Sometimes switching to a different party member is required in order to complete an objective within a mission.
Of course an RPG wouldn’t be complete without level-ups, health restore items, body gear, and energy restore items. The energy restore items will replenish your energy, which your energy is used for mutant powers, such as Cyclops’ Eye Beam shot. All of these items can either be purchased or picked up when a fallen opponent drops them.
One small complaint is that when you are trying to walk in a narrow area - such as a doorway, narrow hall, behind a staircase, etc. - the rest of y our party, which is controlled by the CPU, can get in your way and is very bad about STAYING in your way. Usually you can just jump over them, but sometimes it's more frustrating than that because you have to switch to the character that is in your way in order to clear a path for the trapped X-Man.
Usually the camera works well and can be controlled by the right analog stick. Although, once in a while, the camera will zoom way out (for reasons unknown) or it won't let you rotate around because the area is too narrow. Besides that, all the other controls are nearly perfect.
As soon as you jump into the game, you'll notice that the characters are cell-shaded polygons in a non-cell shaded environments. Some might think this wouldn't go well together, however this game pulls it off just fine. Some of the environments look a little plain, but there was still great attention to detail in just about every level.
The audio in the game could have been nearly perfect if it weren't for the same mysterious music between every fight in every level or the same action music in every battle in every level. However, the music still gives a great feel, and after a while, you probably won't even notice the music anymore because you'll be too focused on the game itself.
Voice-overs in the game are nearly perfect. The acting is great, and most of the voices are perfectly matched with each specific character and their accents. One minor complaint is that if you're playing within a level and you come across dialogue, the X-Men in your group won't speak. This is because you selected from up to 14 different X-Men to put in your 4-person party and apparently Raven Software didn't find it necessary to voice record the dialogue for every single X-Man. Instead, you'll just have to read the conversation in these situations without any speech.
This game will provide you with hours and hours of fun if you want to explore everything, so be prepared to put in around 40 hours to unlock everything. If you just want to see how fast you can beat it, you can probably do so in about 20 hours. Either way, you can probably pick up a used copy of X-Men Legends for a pretty cheap price, so what are you waiting for?
The real kicker is that you can have up to four players play all at once. I never got to experience 4 at a time, but I did have a friend of mine join in. Another great thing is that any other player can jump in the game at any time and also jump out of the game at any time with no complications. The only thing missing is online play with versus and co-op modes. Of course those online modes can be found in the sequel, X-Men Legends: Rise of Apocalypse.
Even if there are just a few shortcomings in the game, they won’t be a factor when you play this game because you’ll be having too much fun to notice them. X-Men Legends is a must own for any X-Men fan, or even just a fan of action.