The overarching plot consists of Deckard and Vivian, another betrayed co-conspirator, attempting to stop Le Fey’s enigmatic plan to take over the world using said released mythical beasts, all with the help of some people calling themselves the Council of 98. Even if you don’t skip over all the narrated cutscenes between levels, the story isn’t convincing enough to be truly engaging and still leaves several things unexplained. (As a matter of fact, even the game’s official website excludes a description of the aberrant Fire Drake creature, which is very resistant to bullets and doesn’t seem to belong at all.) Maybe they are saving all that for the sequel set up by the cliffhanger ending.

Considering how prominently shooting is featured in a first person shooter you would expect it to be the most refined element of any game in that genre. Legendary suffers in noticeable ways here, and playing through the game will help you conceive at least two of the things we’ve come to take for granted in an FPS. Namely, when you hold down the trigger your machinegun should fire and when you move the right stick your aim should adjust accordingly. Granted, that first grievance is more an infrequent annoyance: when holding down the trigger to fire, if you reload you will have to release the trigger before being able to fire again. The second gripe however can be a life ending glitch.

In an attempt to stand out and be sui generis, when you are struck by a werewolf you really feel the impact, as you get turned slightly to the side and have to readjust your aim. The problem is that occasionally when hit you will be unable to adjust your aim at all, in which case you have to stop firing before regaining control of your character. Perhaps the testers were excellent marksmen, but considering how many werewolves there are in the game, it’s hard to see how this anomaly was overlooked.

Technical issues aside, there is very little variety in Deckard’s arsenal, and what few options there are feel a bit imbalanced. Pick up a belt feeding machinegun and you expect it to do major damage, but it takes a tremendous amount of ammo to bring down your basic werewolf. It doesn’t bother you at first because you expect werewolves to be tough, but when one shot from a Desert Eagle pistol consistently pops a werewolf’s head off you’ll have to assume it’s loaded with silver bullets. These are rationalizations you shouldn’t have to make for a video game.

The signet that Pandora’s jar (take that, Erasmus!) left on your hand grants you all sorts of three abilities. Every time you kill a creature you can absorb its Animus, which you can then use in a few ways. If you hold the “Y” button you will use Animus to heal yourself, and it is worth noting that this is the only way to heal in-game. (Even reloading a checkpoint won’t heal you, which makes it easy to get trapped sometimes.) Because holding the “Y” button is also how you draw Animus in, it is impossible to heal yourself while there is Animus around, as you will first have to go through the absorption animation before being able to heal. This makes healing in the middle of a firefight very impractical.

The two other abilities you can perform with Animus are Force Repel (which differs from Force Push^TM only by the lack of a ^TM), and you can also use your Animus to fill plot devices. (Literally, if you don’t fill these various devices, the plot won’t advance.) Force Repel can be used in an interesting way to materialize the ghost-like Nari that fly around and claw at you, but since you’ll want to use all your Animus for healing you’ll likely just wait till they solidify on their own before shooting them. Having such limited Animus powers seems like a hugely missed opportunity to round out the game’s arsenal and give Legendary a bit more personality.

Before you get the impression that Legendary is all absolutely horrible, know that the graphics and sound are at least dependable. About half way through the eight to ten hour campaign you will get to run through a graveyard and into sewers that look particularly impressive. Aside from that, though, none of the other environments stand out as being either hideous or very pretty. The boss fight against the Kraken looks good but certainly not amazing, and while the lithe, completely hairless werewolves have a certain style to them, it’s hard to believe that this was purely a stylistic choice. Varied pelt colors would have been a great way to give the two wolf models some distinction, but more likely than not rendering that much hair was considered too difficult.

Continuing in this trend of mediocrity, none of the audio is stellar and even the voice acting, which you can normally count on for a laugh in other low scoring titles, meets a serviceable standard. In fact, the only thing you’ll notice about the voice acting is that your main character is completely mute, which seems as much of a step backward here as if Claude had been the star of GTA IV.

Although you get achievements for beating the game on Easy, Normal and Hard (no, they don’t stack), people with short tempers, stress disorders or minor heart conditions should stick with Easy. You are still guaranteed to experience cheap, instantaneous deaths. On Easy they just come somewhat less frequently. The fact that the developer was aware of this seems like a twisted joke, as there is even an achievement associated with getting mysteriously crushed, though more often than not what will contribute to your death won’t be lackluster shooting mechanics or environmental insta-kills. It will be issues with simply moving around in the environment.

Regardless of the difficulty you choose, you will fall to your death at some point in the game from having miscalculated a jump. The difficulty lies in the fact that a regular jump makes it almost impossible to clear the tiniest obstacle, while sprinting turns Deckard into an Olympic Long Jump gold medalist. It is also fairly easy to get hung up on objects, which is bad when most of the combat involves backpedaling away from werewolves, griffons and minotaurs. Exploitatively, on open ground its easy to dodge attacks because the sprint button works just as well in reverse as it does running forward, but with clutter that has poorly defined edges littering most battlefields, its rare that a fight won’t degenerate into just standing still and getting pounded on while hoping your enemy dies first so you can use the Animus to heal yourself.

Final Score: D

Comments (4)

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Parris Lilly said:

... I am so sad to see this game get such a poor review, i was really looking forward to it

November 18, 2008

Addam Kearney said:

... That's too bad. When I first saw media for the game, it really looked interesting. The GameCock stamp (wow, that sounds extremly dirty), was the first sign that something would most likely be bad. I may actually play this just for comparison, but it'll be next year at the earliest.

November 18, 2008

Anthony said:

... Hey, D's get degrees! (Well, C's in your major.)

November 18, 2008

Joe said:

... push it under the rug

November 19, 2008