Legendary

If opening Pandora’s Box sounds like your idea of fun this holiday season, you might want to check out Legendary.

The economic crisis has called for everyone to be more prudent in spending their money come Christmas time. Everything is about value, how much bang you can get for your buck. So when you see a game like Legendary sitting on the shelf, it seems like a good idea: epic fights against mythical creatures, a story spanning from New York to London and a fight to save the world.

That is, until you find out your job is to break into a museum to open Pandora’s Box. Literally. Your job at the start is to open a casket called Pandora’s Box.

*Sigh*

Apart from being totally cliché, the level design is boring as well. You’ll only ever have one path to follow, one direction to go. Even when Deckard steps outside onto the streets of New York City, the resulting debris falls in such a way to leave only one path.

What’s the point of introducing the player to broad outdoor environments if it’s the same as running through corridors and sewers? And while I’m at it, why are gamers still forced to wade through virtual sludge? Sewers aren’t a fun place to be, in real life or otherwise.

This would be forgivable if there was a compelling reason to keep playing, but there isn’t. Legendary’s only trick is to throw mythical creatures at you and hope you’ll enjoy fighting them. The problem is that half the time you’re actually fighting enemy soldiers and they’re more fun to fight than the supernatural beasts and werewolves anyway.

Not content with boring you to death, Legendary steals better ideas from other games and dulls them down too. Combat is usually sorted out through guns but there’s a second option with Animus, an energy source granted to Deckard as a curse for opening Pandora’s Box in the first place.

Sounds interesting? Sure. That’s because it’s a rip-off of the Plasmids in Bioshock, except the Animus is nowhere near as functional. You’ll need a full bar of energy for the Animus to do any damage at all, and that’s if you’re not using the Animus to heal yourself. If the use of magic is going to be reduced to a ethereal med-kit in practice, why bother including it at all?

Legendary is completely forgettable on every conceivable level. It’s even easier to ignore given that there are so many better games being released this season, especially in the shooter genre.

Save yourself the anguish, and buy something you’ll have fun with, unless you like using a DVD as a frisbee.

legendary-pc
Developer: Spark Unlimited
Publisher: Atari
Classification: M
Formats: PS3 (reviewed), Xbox 360, PC
URL: Legendary

Reviewed by Alex Walker