X-Men Legends [Xbox]

Part of the whole superhero thing is being, well, super. You know, bending steel, climbing walls, that sort of thing. But an important corollary is the camaraderie, when superheroes band together to form Dynamic Duos, Fantastic Fours, Justice Leagues, and so on. Because X-Men Legends captures this so well, it's right up there with Freedom Force and Spider-Man 2 as a best case example of how comic books can be turned into games.

Legends captures the camaraderie largely in the gameplay. It plays like Diablo, in which you plow through an area beating up bad guys and earning experience to spend on new skills. But unlike Diablo and its subsequent clones, this is all about teamwork rather than a lone adventurer storming the dungeons. At preset points in Legends, you can arrange a team of four X-Men of your choice. But as you play, you control one X-Man at a time while the computer runs the other three (and it does so surprisingly well).

The result is a fluid brawling system where you can charge in using one of Colossus' powerful smashes to take out the first enemy, then swap to Storm to fire off a chain lightning attack that weakens everyone, then swap over to Nightcrawler for a series of surgical teleportation strikes to mop up. Or you can just hang back as Cyclops, picking off enemies at your leisure while the other X-Men rush ahead. To encourage the group dynamic, simultaneous attacks result in combos that do extra damage and earn more experience. Many of the enemies also have resistances to certain types of attacks, which encourages you not to rely too heavily on one X-Man's powers.

The gameplay is clearly oriented towards action, sometimes cramming the screen so full of mayhem that it's hard to get your bearings. There are a surprising number of destructible objects. With a strong enough character, you can pretty much pick up or break anything you can see. At first, this gimmick is mainly for treasure hunting; you'll want to bust open crates, barrels, and furniture to look for healing and power potions. But as the game progresses, the destructible objects make the battles even more gratifying.

Battling superheroes can do a lot of damage. As your attacks get more powerful, particularly in the last third of the game, X-Men Legends captures this wonderfully with shattering windows, crumbling walls, and flying debris accompanying your fights. This is the stuff that puts the "super" in "superhero."

The levels are mainly dungeon crawls, with a few timed challenges, some escort missions, and the odd base defense thrown in for good measure. As with most RPGs, your objectives are usually contrived excuses to drive you from point A to point B. There are various minor puzzles requiring the use of X-Men powers, but these tend to fall into two categories: building ice/lava/telepathy bridges or having Nightcrawler teleport past a barrier to open it. There are plenty of boss battles, but fortunately, they tend to rely on brute force rather than puzzle solutions.

As you play and your characters advance, there's a deceptively complex skill tree for each X-Man. At first glance, it looks like it might offer a lot of choices, but a character's progression is tightly controlled by the level requirements for his powers, offering only minimal wriggle room. This does limit some of the free-form feeling that drives an action RPG, but since you're playing with established X-Men rather than building your own character, it doesn't really detract from the game.

Unfortunately, there are times that X-Men Legends shows a disappointing lack of polish. Perhaps the biggest problem is the typical bad camera that plagues many action games. You can swing it around to see what you're doing, but that's not always possible. Sometimes you're fighting things you can't see and you simply can't spare the fingers to move the camera. And at some points, the camera gets trapped behind a wall or outside the level.

Then there are minor issues of consistency. Although there's lots of spirited voice work (there's something incredibly gratifying about having Patrick Stewart intone the names of your X-Men as you select them), there are times when it seems like an actor didn't bother showing up for their recording session; you hear half the conversation and you read the other half. The story also sometimes feels disjointed and desultory. At one point, Magneto is incapacitated, carried off by mysterious enemies. But the next thing you know, he's launched a plot to blackmail the world. However, on the whole, the storyline is a great melange of familiar X-Men topics like Sentinels, Morlocks, the Astral Plane, and various characters' back stories.

X-Men Legends has such respect for its license, it manages to accomplish something most superhero games can't do: It makes the characters feel like characters rather than polygonal models with painted-on superhero skins and celebrity voiceovers. X-Men Legends is unique for the way it brings out the sense of camaraderie among this band of superpowered outcasts in colorful costumes, celebrating their diversity not just in the way it tells the story, but in the way the game plays.

If you're a fan of the comic books, Legends makes a particular effort to reach out and touch you. The developers at Raven obviously know their stuff. They've done a phenomenal job of weaving the universe into the gameplay, storyline, cutscenes, and all the little nooks and crannies you can explore if you want. When you can successfully translate the central theme of a comic into a gameplay experience, minor problems like camera control and an inconsistent story fall by the wayside. Legends is a compelling game for those who aren't fans of the license, but it's an absolute must-have for X-Men followers; the bigger the fan, the more you need this game.