X-Men Legends is an action role-playing game developed by Raven Software and published by Activision for multiple platforms. Based off the popular Marvel comic book franchise created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby making it debut on September of 1963. Meaning that of next month X-Men will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary since first being published. Today we look at the PlayStation 2 port of the game.

The game starts off with a news broadcast featuring various reports of mutant incidents throughout the globe, bringing us to New York where a new mutant by the name of Alison Crestmere just coming into her powers gives the town a lava bath before being captured by Brotherhood member: The Blob. You start the game off as everybody's favorite lone wolf, Wolverine.

Wolverine: Hey, bub. You should have called in sick today.

And as you go on you'll eventually have enough X-Men on your team to play up to four players. As the genre would suggest the game plays as any action game with stages, enemies and plenty of different obstacles to overcome. Only it adds in an role-playing element of leveling up, equipment items to raise your stats and working to make your characters stronger in order to stand up against harder enemies that are to come. So you aren't constantly button mashing your way through the game let's look at the controls.

Controls: The X and O buttons are how you attack and mixing them up allow you to perform a vary of combos with each X-Man you control. The Square button is the action button for reading helpful tips, opening doors, going to a new area and talking to people. Triangle allows you to jump. The R1 and L1 buttons allow you to replenish health and energy respectively when you possess the appropriate item and the L2 button to call your allies while R2 is for the super power selection. The directional buttons switch between the mutants in your party while the left analog stick moves your character and the right moves the camera.

Going off the updated costumes X-Men Legends takes place in the Ultimate Marvel universe, a separate universe that Marvel created in order to attract non-comic book fans and not scare them off with many years of preestablished continuity. One would ask why they even bother to go through so much trouble to reach out to people who don't read comics anyway, but I digress. The game offers plenty of throwbacks from previous comic books and fanfare from alternate costumes, comic book collections, concept art and its enemies that can be unlocked in the Danger Room mode found on the main menu.

The voice acting is top notch and while there are probably many familiar voice actors in the game, I think the most notable one is Patrick Stewart who's back to reprise his role as Charles Xavier. When I played the game for the first time I thought it was just a really good Patrick Stewart impersonator, but I checked and it's him. He isn't new to voice acting either as anyone who has watched Family Guy and American Dad will be able to tell you.

I especially like how the story for the most part is told from the point of view of Alison, voiced by Cree Summers who is probably best known for her character Winifred “Freddie” Brooks on A Different Work and her work on the Rugrats and Inspector Gadget. Alison has just been formally introduced to the X-Men and is struggling with a decision to join the institute and learn how to control her powers. She's our eyes on the outside looking in and is able to ask many of the questions that we as players may be wanting to ask ourselves. And it's always refreshing to see a female character take center stage who isn't just eye-candy. More of that please.

Cons: Boy, haven't used this word in a while. If there are some critiques I have with the game, it's that the graphics for one thing isn't the best that the platforms it was released on had to offer at the time. The FMVs are still good and you barely notice anything during the gameplay, but during those moments where the cut scenes are taken from the actual gameplay, you really start to notice it. They look like little puppets. These definitely would have been better done as FMVs.

And while I'm not sure how many copy of the games does this, when I reached the end of X-Men Legends in both the PS2 and GameCube ports I've played, it starts to glitch up bad. So much that I had to save constantly and then load up at the save point just to be able to complete the game. Just something to look out for when you make it to the final boss.

With all of that said, whether you're a long time X-Men fan or just getting into the series, X-Men Legends is a must have for any X-Men fan. The gameplay is enjoyable, it has plenty of X-Men characters to choose from and villains to fight with a well constructed story.

This is ToriJ signing off!