X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse for PC Review

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Raven Software introduced us to their style of team-based action RPGs featuring comic book characters with X-Men Legends. Despite its flaws, it proved to be a fun game that can be enjoyed solo and with friends and it was successful enough to spawn a sequel which also doubled as a stepping stone to the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series. Developed primarily by Raven Software and published by Activision, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse was released for PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, and PC in September, 2005 and the N-Gage in October of that same year. For this review, I played the PC version which was ported by Beenox. X-Men Legends II continues the style of gameplay established in the first game and includes new features and refinements.

The story opens with the X-Men and Brotherhood of Mutants joining forces to take on a greater threat – Apocalypse who is waging war on humans and mutants. His goal is to find four mutants with “harmonic DNA” and use them to take over the world. Compared to the last game, the story feels more focused and I thought the basic premise and voice acting was fine but the writing leaves a lot to be desired. The plot is very predictable with interactions containing a lot of unnecessary exposition. On the plus side, the story is backed by a solid voice cast including Tara Strong, Jennifer Hale, Steve Blum, Dee Bradley Baker, John DiMaggio, and Patrick Stewart who once again reprises his role as Professor Xavier.

Like the first game, X-Men Legends II is an action RPG that supports up to four players. They can join forces locally or online. If playing solo, you control a team of four characters and can switch between them on-the-fly. The story plays out in acts and each act takes you to a different hub area where you can view mission briefings, interact with NPCs, buy and sell items, play trivia for experience, and review your stats and unlocked artwork. When you complete objectives and defeat enemies, your characters gain experience and eventually level up allowing you to distribute points into their stats, powers, and abilities. In addition to powers, each character comes with passive abilities and boosts that can be improved and they offer different offensive and defensive bonuses.

Each character can walk, run, jump, pickup and throw objects and enemies, perform light and heavy attacks, and chain attacks together to perform special attacks. They can also unleash powers which drains through energy. Characters are given a lot more powers this time around and you can swap them out. Extreme Powers also make return as do power combos. Unfortunately, you still can’t block or dodge manually but you can pump points into a character’s block ability. Yes, blocking is an “ability” that you would need to waste points on but it’s better than nothing I suppose. X-Men Legends 2 does support controllers and I used an Xbox Series X controller. It worked fine for the most part but I found that I could only move my characters in four directions unless I rotated the camera as I would move them around. It sometimes made trying to aim attacks frustrating.

Since I have played the first game and the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, I kind of knew what to expect going into this and in my opinion, X-Men Legends II feels more like a dungeon crawler than any of the others. Each act takes you to a different location which normally features one or two major what I’ll call “dungeons” consisting of numerous areas to explore. Furthermore, each act plays out the same; travel to areas, fight a bunch of enemies, defeat a boss, move onto the next act, rinse and repeat. The gameplay does get repetitive but there is some depth. The characters you choose can be important. Your roster does level up with you so you can use your favorite characters or swap them out frequently and still make progress. X-Men Legends II is also quite accessible. You have the option to distribute points into your characters manually or let the game do it. You can configure certain aspects of AI behavior and one thing I really like is the ability to open a portal back to the hub areas. You’ll discover Xtraction Points in the environments that not only act as save points and fast travel points, but are also where you can swap out characters and change their skins. Like the first game, there’s usually a good distance between them but because you can open a portal back to the hub areas, you can save your progress and swap out characters more often and without having to backtrack.

Items are often dropped by defeated enemies and are also found by breaking things in the environments. Tech-bits act as currency and you can store a limited amount of health and energy packs that can be consumed at any time to restore health and energy respectively. You’ll acquire gear that provide bonuses to the characters when equipped and come in different rarities. Much of the gear I would pick up required my characters to be at a higher level than they were currently at and because of that, I just let the game auto equip gear. You can store gear in a stash at the hub areas and I primarily utilized it to store character-specific gear that I would be able to equip later. You can buy and sell gear and even spend tech-bits on training which means buying additional skill points, redistributing them, and increasing a character’s level. There are collectibles to find like sketch books and comic books and special items like data discs and homing beacons. Collecting enough data discs will award you something special like increasing the amount of health and energy packs you can hold for example and collecting enough homing beacons in each location unlocks a portal in the hub that takes you to a secret bonus area where you can acquire special armor and finding all of the armor pieces will unlock a new playable character.

The Danger Room does make a return and you want to be on the lookout for Danger Room Discs that unlock Danger Room challenges. The Danger Room consists of multiple grades, each of which features numerous challenges to complete. If you miss some discs in the environments you can always revisit those environments and search for them or just buy them. Like the first game, the Danger Room challenges can be completed as many times as you want and will grant your characters experience among other rewards but I found X-Men Legends 2 to be less grindy. I never really felt the need to complete the challenges let alone repeat them. Although, there is a reward for completing all of them. As I progressed through the story, I found that my characters were always at a higher level than the level recommendations of the unlocked Danger Room challenges. There are multiple difficulties and the hardest does need to be unlocked so I played through the game on Normal. That said, I never felt like I needed to grind for experience and I would level up faster progressing through the story than I would repeating Danger Room challenges.

As I progressed, I noticed enemies were always at a higher level than my characters and the difficulty or challenge remained pretty consistent throughout my entire experience. Enemies will attack you the moment they spot you and the fights consist of a lot of button mashing. If playing solo, enemies typically target the player so AI team mates can usually hold their own fairly well. It also helps that you can decide when they should consume health packs. Knowing how to perform stuns, trips, and launch foes into the air can be helpful during certain encounters and certain team members will work better together than others which can also depend on what abilities you’ve distributed points into. Furthermore, selecting certain combinations of characters will grant you special bonuses. Enemies will come at you with melee attacks and unleash projectiles, some have special attributes, and at a certain point in the story, you’ll be introduced to enemies protected by a shield that can only be broken by meeting certain requirements. Bosses make up the more interesting encounters because they have different phases and there are things you’ll have to do to make them vulnerable.

Each act will take you to different locations but as mentioned before, it’s usually one or two major locations per act, each consisting of multiple areas that tend to look and feel the same which is a bummer and can make navigation confusing. Luckily, most of the time, your automap will include objective markers and arrows pointing to them so you should always have and idea of where to go. It’s a shame the environments within an act aren’t more diverse because the game takes you to a decent variety of locations including Genosha, New York, Canada, Egypt, and the Savage Land. The developers could have done so much more with these. One thing I really like about the environments is that they’re large and feel open-ended. There’s plenty of branching paths and rooms off to the sides that can lead to items, collectibles, caches, and tech stations which can permanently increase a character’s stats. There will be dangers to avoid and obstacles that can only be overcome by certain characters. You’ll have to interact with things, collect items, create bridges, move objects, and you can even break through certain walls.

X-Men Legends II retains the variation of cel-shading used in the first game so the character models have a comic book style look and they mesh well with the environments. The visual effects look good and help make each strike landed and power unleashed feel impactful. As you fight and unleash powers, you’ll destroy various parts of the environments like objects and walls which makes encounters look more exciting. As mentioned earlier, many of the environments within an act tend to look the same which is my biggest gripe with the presentation. I do want to mention that the game does offer anti-aliasing but I couldn’t get the setting to stay on so I forced it through the Nvidia Control Panel. As for the audio, the sound effects are good and I think the music was an improvement over that of the first game. I won’t say it’s incredible but a lot of the tunes make situations feel more dramatic and I thought some of the more what I’ll call atmospheric tunes were catchy. On the technical side, I’m happy to report I encountered no issues.

Now that I’ve played all of the Ultimate Alliance games and both X-Men Legends games, I can honestly say I still think the first Ultimate Alliance is the best. But I had a good time with X-Men Legends II. I do think it’s better than its predecessor. For one thing, I like that it lets you play as characters from both the X-Men and Brotherhood. I like the more open-ended environments and the gameplay, overall, feels faster-paced. The developers even rectified some of the issues I had with the first game. The ability to open a portal at almost any time is probably my favorite addition. The online multiplayer is one of the bigger highlights but even when playing solo, it offers a great time if you like this style of gameplay. It can feel like a repetitive button masher and I think the developers could have done a lot more with the environments but there’s enough depth here to make the gameplay fun and engaging all the way through. Plus, it comes with plenty of replay value. Not only can you play through the game on multiple difficulties, you can start a new game after beating it and carry over all your characters and their stats. I also want to point out that there are plenty of mods out there.

I would absolutely recommend X-Men Legends II to fans of the first game and the comics. Despite its flaws, there are a lot of improvements that I think make this more enjoyable than it’s predecessor. It’s more accessible, I thought it felt less grindy, it gives you a larger roster of playable characters, its got more replay value, and it can be played solo or with friends locally or online. It’s a solid and fun action game. Definitely check it out.