Raven and Activision revisit X-Men dungeon crawling with improvements in almost every area.
Last year, Activision and Raven brought us one of the most satisfying X-Men video game adaptations to date with X-Men Legends. Now they've taken that basic dungeon crawler design and updated it in nearly every area in a way that anticipates a variety of play-styles.
As you learn in the opening scene, the X-Men have formed an alliance with their enemies from the Brotherhood, led by Magneto himself, in order to fight Apocalypse, a powerful mutant who has lived for thousands of years and believes it is the duty of the strong to destroy the weak, human and mutant alike. This setup gives players a chance to play as some of their favorite characters from "the other side". However, some fans may still be a bit disappointed as there are only four playable Brotherhood characters of the total eighteen -- especially since Sunfire made the cut rather than Pyro. Party lines aside, there is a varied mix of characters to choose from, and after you've completed the introductory level, you'll have access to fifteen fighters throughout the entire game, with another three available after you make the effort to unlock them. When mixing and matching your characters, you might also happen across specific teams with extra stat bonuses, such as Double Date (Rogue, Gambit, Cyclops, and Jean), Brotherhood of Evil, Old School, or Femme Fatale.
Controls remain largely unchanged from the first game. You travel through each level in groups of four, and in single player, you can easily switch between characters in your current group by pressing the control pad in a specific direction. You perform melee attacks by pressing combinations of the A and B buttons, jump with Y, and pick up items with X. Holding the R trigger toggles the face buttons to correspond to your character's various mutant powers, which are displayed in a diamond formation on the screen. What's new is that you can now access a much broader range of mutant abilities by holding R and using the cross pad.
Taking advantage of these powers of course requires that you first attain them. Leveling up gives you four stat points to alter attributes such as attack power and speed and one skill point to boost or gain new mutant abilities. Abilities include not only attacks, temporary stat boosts in battle, and Xtreme powers, but also lasting stat bonuses and special attributes such as flying, Nightcrawler's teleport, and Might, which increases the physical strength of guys like Colossus. Constantly gaining and improving your moves is really one of the most exciting aspects of the game. While Juggernaut starts out with just a single, slow, powerful punch, he'll eventually be able to charge head-first through groups of enemies like a freight train. And with his Path of Destruction Xtreme move, he temporarily gains unstoppable strength, smashing enemies with damage in the neighborhood of 32000 HP (which is far more than any of them have).
While geeks like me tend to enjoy fiddling with stats and meticulously molding their characters' strengths and weaknesses, it may not be so exciting to others, especially when it comes to multiplayer. Spending a lot of time in the menus can be a real drag on a multiplayer session, so Raven has wisely included options to automatically distribute stat points, skill points, or new gear. This feature keeps the pace moving, and it can be set independently for each character in case there are some characters you want to focus on and others you couldn't care less about.
Also, because of the abundance of powers available, it may not be easy to determine which moves you like right away, but don't worry; the game has you covered there too. In addition to the piles of gear stacked up in the shop, you can also buy extra experience levels and skill points, but most importantly, you can spend cold cash for the ability to reassign all of the skill points you've gained for a character. So once you've unlocked and tested all of your skills, you can use this option to return to a blank slate and use the points you've gained to max out your favorite moves and forget about the duds.
Rise of Apocalypse plays out in five acts as you move base around the planet. Each act has a safe area (like the mansion in the first game) and several missions to complete. You'll camp out in areas like Magneto's Sanctuary, the Savage Land, and the Weapon X labs, and there is plenty to do before you go out and beat things. There are shops, manned by Beast and Forge, a Hero Stash to store excess armor, and a trivia game to test your knowledge of the X-Men, giving experience bonuses for right answers. The review computer provides a single location to check out comic covers, cinema scenes, load screens, concept art, and even look at how many secret goodies you're still missing in each act. The Danger Room computer is here too, giving you a chance to train, gain extra experience, and earn unique items from character challenges.
Most of the levels are enormous. There is a lot of ground to cover, a lot of villains to beat the snot out of, and a lot of set pieces to break. The majority of enemies are easy pickings, but some enemies have special attributes, such as shields, that require you to execute specific combos or resistances to certain kinds of attacks. Parts of the environment require certain mutant powers to pass. If you want to move a huge stone block, you'll need Colossus or Rogue to push it away. You may need Magneto to build a metal bridge across a gap or you might just have Toad spit on a fire to put it out. Boss battles often require you to shift your attention from the boss to devices or allies surrounding him, and fans should be happy with all of the different villains you'll go up against. In addition to Apocalypse's Horsemen, you'll fight against the likes of Lady Deathstrike, Sauron, Stryfe, Sugar Man, hordes of Sentinels, and many others.
Although the first X-Men Legends was a purely start-to-finish affair, Rise of Apocalypse gives you a lot of room to move back and forth between levels. In addition to saving and changing teams, extraction points can now be used to jump to different levels or head to base to pick up supplies or try a Danger Room challenge. Plus, once you save Blink, early in the game, you can call on her teleporting ability to quickly take you back to base at any time, but you'll have to wait five minutes before the game will let you do it a second time. Then, once you have finished the game, you'll be able to carry your leveled-up characters into a new game, perhaps on a harder difficulty setting, where you can continue to make them stronger.
Multiplayer plays pretty much the same, except you benefit from the energy and real cooperation of other players. In some ways, it can be harder and more frantic without any individual player in control of the camera, but it does make things like executing power combos a lot easier. Multiplayer couldn't be easier to set up; all anyone has to do is pick up a controller and press start, and when that friend wants to leave, just unplug his controller. One problem that pops up in multiplayer, though, is that since the camera ties the group together, it's impossible for a flying character like Rogue to quickly cross a chasm to find hidden goodies, leaving you to either come back while playing alone or unplug the other players' controllers temporarily to check the area. Also, hidden away in the main menu are some quick versus modes in the Danger Room to put X-Man against X-Man.
While X-Men Legends II is truly excellent in most regards, there are a few significant problems with the equipment system. First of all, even though they've added the Hero Stash, which holds an extra sixty items, your party can still only hold twenty items at a time. This amount is sufficient for a while, but at some point, the game just turns on item overload, and you might easily come across thirty to fifty items in a single stage. What this means is that on an increasingly regular basis, you have to dredge through your inventory and figure out what you don't need anymore or simply sell things off blindly to make space for items that you know you want. The auto-equip function doesn't help alleviate this problem much, since it is only applied to characters in your current group at the time that you pick up an item. Also, equipment I picked up throughout the game was usually for characters ten experience levels higher than any of mine, probably because I routinely rotated the fifteen to keep any of them from becoming useless, rather than using the same characters all the time.
The equipment system hides a more sinister problem, though; one that will hopefully be ironed out in future copies of the game. Somehow, hanging on to lots of equipment can cause a number of serious bugs to show up. I personally experienced the game crash about eight times or so, and also had several bizarre experiences with my skills and equipment. One time, a character's skills were all suddenly maxed out. Another time, all of a character's skills were missing. Then one of my unique items for Nightcrawler permanently turned into a dud, void of any stats or description. Browsing message boards, I found that some people have even encountered corrupted save files, forcing them to start the game over from scratch, and in most cases, the other problems were solved simply by emptying out the Hero Stash.
While the bugs are a real problem, it's worth taking the time to avoid them, because Rise of the Apocalypse is truly a great game. With a great story and polished cinemas and voice-work, it has a lot for fans, and it gives players considerable freedom to approach the game however they like, either as a single-player or multiplayer experience.
