I bought this game years ago out of a discount bin. Played it minimally and then proceeded on to something else. Well, I decided to play it again and I won it as well. As far as the two X-men Legends games, I think I have a slight preference for the first one, but I think I like this one a bit more than the second Ultimate Alliance game. The Marvel Ultimate Alliance games were sort of sequels to these games; however, at the end of this one a sequel is indicated as it showed a villain laughing maniacally, but this did not carry over to the Ultimate Alliance games. Then again, at the end of the first Ultimate Alliance game it was indicated that Galactus would be the primary villain of the second game and that never materialized either. That would have been cooler than the crap they did do as the second Alliance game would do the Civil War storyline (which I hated) and have a very weak villain at the end. This one has a good villain fight at the end which is not usually present in these games. Dr. Doom was alright, Magneto would have been cool, but he wasn't the true ending boss. This one on the other hand as a great final fight and a great villain in Apocalypse.
The story has the X-men and Brotherhood coming together to take on the evil Apocalypse who believes that only the strong shall survive. He has kidnapped Polaris and also has his sight set on three other mutants for his scheme. Helping him is the equally maniacal Mr. Sinister. Along with other powerful mutants his nefarious plans take him to the mutant haven Genosha, the Savage Land, Canadian outposts, New York and finally Egypt. It will take everything the X-men and the Brotherhood have to defeat this powerful foe. They will also have to stop themselves from fighting each other.
The game play is action based RPG. You go through a level with a four person team you choose and there a are a lot of characters to choose from. You control one of them, but you just need to push a button to switch out and control another. I used Wolverine and Cyclops the entire way, but switched up the other two. It is a bit annoying leveling up as I just think it began to take too long near the end. Not to power up the main stats, but rather to power up your abilities. You get four points to charge up the normal stuff, and only one for abilities so unless you work at it indefinitely, you are not going to charge too many things to max. The fighting is rather cool, but the level design is kind of uninspired. Kind of how like in the second UA game, the levels are kind of uninspired and very monotonous.
The game is fun, just not anything all that great. The loading in this one is horrid. I realize it is PS2, but Final Fantasy X did not take this long to load and it had more voice acting and better graphics so really no excuse for such a long load, especially to just access the menu! The voice acting here is okay; however, Charles Xavier was awesome as Patrick Stewart did his voice. Kind of a bummer Ian didn't do Magneto, but pretty much the rest of the voices are very familiar sounding from countless anime cartoons I have watched. Nice villain here and good story. Make the levels more varied and this one could have been incredible. Say more like the New York stage, its level was different and it was also the shortest, all others were like one hallway after another. Still, the game at least has a nice variety of characters to control.
