My first impressions of
Legendary were a bit mixed as the experience is a bit uneven but first some back story on the game. In
Legendary you play Charles Deckard, a thief hired to open a recently discovered artifact which turns out to be Pandora's Box. This is bad as you succeed in your mission and opening the box unleashes a whole crowd of creatures on the Earth. You now have to escape the museum, figure out what you've done, and how you're going to fix it.
When you open the box you are branded with a Signet that allows you to collect animus energy from the monsters you kill. You can use this energy to either heal yourself or send out a pulse that knocks the creatures back. You can't use this pulse to impact non-magical things but it's useful in that you can knock creatures off heights or into environmental hazards (like speeding trains) and it's a good way to stun a group of creatures when they surround you. To collect energy you hold the Y button down near one of the blue orb groupings and it automatically absorbs the energy. Holding down the Y button away from that converts the energy to health. To send out a a pulse you double tap the Y button. It does take some getting used to and I do wish they had mapped that function to a button but I did get used to it over time.
The rest of the controls are standard FPS fare. You switch weapons with the d-pad as you have four types of weapons to switch between (melee, pistol, thrown, and primary). It's not a bad system but I was a little to find that there wasn't a pistol/gun melee attack and you have to switch back to your melee weapon if you wanted to conserve ammo.
The games early stages feel a bit like Half Life as you're running around and seeing the mess you've made of things. Instead of Black Mesa, it's the New York Metropolitan Museum and you're dealing with mythical creatures not aliens from another dimension. The early parts of running through museum are OK but it's not until you you reach the streets of New York that you realize the full extent of what you've done. The sky of Manhattan is clouded over and Griffons are circling the streets, picking up cars and people with abandon. Spark does a really good job of presenting you with a chaos caused by fantasy creatures running wild in downtown New York City.
As I mentioned earlier my impressions of the game were mixed at the start. The game takes a while to get going and it feels like a straight forward shooter replete with fire breathing frogs (OK, Firedrakes ) and black hooded soldiers until you reach the werewolves. That's right, werewolves. I'm not sure how werewolves got into the Pandora mythology but I'm not complaining.
There are two cool parts to the werewolves. The first is that their AI is really well done. Sometimes they approach and attack you directly, sometimes they hang back and throw things at you, and sometimes they do hit and run attacks. It all depends on how you are attacking them. The path finding AI for the werewolves is also solid as I watched one wolf work his way around the environment, climbing up walls, scaling ladders, and jumping open spaces to get at me. It was a bit mesmerizing watching him work his way from one side of a container filled room to the other.
The second cool thing about the werewolves is that if you don't decapitate them they come back to life. You can either shoot their heads off or shoot them until they go down and bust out your trusty axe to finish the job. The axe method is a little quirky as it's sometimes hard to find the right angle but this is something that they will hopefully fix in the final build of the game. It was also cool to watch a werewolf try to protect his head as I sprayed him with sub machine gun fire.
So far I'm finding that
Legendary isn't bad. There are some very cool things in the game but I'm hoping the game gets a little less linear later on in the game. Most FPS games are linear affairs but hide it. While
Legendary has a few alternate paths but I feel like I'm being led more than finding my own way if that makes any sense. The game is going to be a boon to achievement whores those as there are a lot of easy achievements early on in the game. Be sure to check out our
interview earlier this week for more details on the game.
