The hero’s and heroines of the legendary superhero group called the X-men have had more than their share of video games over the years. Everything from the early days of the 4 player romps and the street fighter style one on one’s in the arcade to reaching into your homes on just about every console that was available at the time. Although none of those were really all that great (except for Children of the Atom, still one of my favorites to this day), X-men Legends tries to take everybody’s favorite rag tag group of misunderstood and feared champions on a slightly different journey. Instead of the regular side scrolling, jump, kill, jump, kill action of previous games, Raven Software turned to the RPG, 45 degree overhead, hack and slash style of classic games like Diablo and Gauntlet.

The game play as a whole is quite drawing in that it gives you the ability to create a team of four X-men characters from the many that are available and become accessible as the story progresses. It then allows you to switch from character to character to control each as you seem fit. Each character has their own unique ability which is the main reason why X-Men games should be successful. Wolverine, the clawed Canadian with his savage rage and uncanny healing ability is one of the main physical characters; where as Jean Grey would be a mental attacker and Cyclops a ranged energy attacker. Each character also has abilities that are used for more than just combat however. In more than a few levels you will need Iceman to create bridges of ice to traverse gaps as well as having Cyclops or Storm use their powers to weld objects together. Throughout the game there are extraction points which will allow you to retrieve a team member if you don’t have them with you as well as allow you to buy healing items and armor just like any other RPG game.

The semi-cel shaded graphics are reminiscent of Dragon Quarter, where the solid black line that surrounds each character does it’s best to convey the cartoon look and feel of the game. The costumes worn by the X-men are that of the Ultimate X-Men line, so don’t expect the looks of each character to be a reflection of the comics or even the movies. There are however, flashback missions where you play through memories of certain X-Men and you will in fact have the original costumes on for those. The flash back missions, although early in the game, railroad you from the games actually storyline and make the game seem to drag on longer then necessary. The game is quite lengthy without the extra missions and easily weighs in at over 20 hours of play.

The missions are quite diverse from one another and will take you from one corner of the earth and even off it, encountering many characters from the comics along the way. In each area you travel to, there are a great amount of items to interact with such as picking them up to throw or destroy to find power ups and heath. Sadly though, as long as the game is, it really doesn’t start to get interesting until about 10 hours in, when you have many of the characters available to you and they are leveled up enough to have powers that add some snap and pop the otherwise repetitive play. Having Colossus punch an enemy through a wall is just sadistically satisfying enough to wait those ten hours to see.

The 45 degree over head view of the game does take a bit to get used to since there are only three camera zooms which are normal, close and directly over head. The rotating camera, unfortunately, suffers the same fate as far too many games out there. It refuses to turn most of the time and sometimes gets you stuck against a wall while you are taking the beating of your life. There are times as well, although not too often but often enough, where if the team gets separated fighting different opponents, the camera will zoom way back and the characters you are controlling then become mere specks on the screen. Trying to tell when you are attacked becomes a button mashing free for all until the camera resumes its normal position.

For fans of the X-Men series of games, comics and movies, they will definitely want to check this game out, even if they aren’t fans of RPG style games. When playing with more then one person the game greatly changes and becomes much more fun and engrossing. One thing to keep in mind though is that this is indeed an RPG. Although it may not seem like one, it is and the games length reveals that very well. You will need to stick with the game for some time until you start to see the real fun start to shine through, but when it does, X-men Legends becomes an X-cellent game.