Legendary Review – Opening Pandora’s Box

So . . was Pandora’s Box “really” worth opening ?

by dkpartriach:

©2008 David Hilton

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We’ve had alien invasions, attacks from monsters underground, zombie infestations, and world-domination plots all threaten to destroy modern civilization unless we save it.  Games designed to stoke our hero complexes tend to fill us with warm fuzzy feelings of accomplishment and enjoyment.

Legendary brings a new and promising idea to this theme by mixing Greek mythology and Da Vinci Code-like secret societies.  It all sounds great, but will it be like Spark’s other great idea game Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty and fail to live up to its initial concept?  In short, will the game really be legendary?

Let’s start with the somewhat fresh idea.  You are a thief for hire who stupidly fails to do his research on a job for a secret society called the “Black Order”, releasing evil mythological creatures into the world by opening the ancient Pandora’s Box.  Oops.

Luckily you get the chance to redeem yourself and become a hero and save the world when you are given a new paranormal ability.  That part sounds like the TV show Heroes, actually.  To be honest I’d rather invincibility or mind power over the rather useless Animus energy ‘force push’ I got with my glowing satanic-whispering hand.

As far as paranormal weapons of mass destruction go, Greek mythology’s Pandora’s Box is right up there with the Ark of the Covenant (and it looks a lot like the Indiana Jones version too).  Though the real mythology’s diseases have been replaced with creatures like griffins and annoying giggling fairies, the point is that suffering and evil is released and evil human forces want to harness it.

You and another secret society, The Council, must stop them while avoiding being eaten by werewolves, minotaurs, Krakens, and lava creatures.

Load the disc and you get a nice guitar and drum ‘action is coming’ tune in the menu.  Then, oh no what have they done, it starts in New York.  Again.  Another bloody game set in New York.  For much of the first part of the game I was having Alone In The Dark flashbacks (and they weren’t good).  Does Atari have a brief that says: “all the games we publish must have New York levels”?

Okay, well time for Charles Deckard (you) to save the world.  Much like Alone In The Dark, the New York cityscape erupts into an orgasm of destruction around you, making for a chaotic, linear and blocky gaming experience.

You are basically pushed down blocked off corridors to escape destruction, while watching set events like people getting munched by creatures and observing the many dead and bloody bodies on the floor (looking like mannequins with shiny red paint applied).

You do a lot of overriding ubiquitous keypads without using any hands (neat trick…if it wasn’t just lazy programming).  Great.  The promising ’spark’ of a good idea has just failed to catch fire and has been reduced to the all-too familiar last-gen gameplay already.

Whoever at Spark comes up with these interesting game ideas should find a bigger more ambitious game developing company.  I know it’s hard work making a game these days, and I certainly couldn’t do it, but when you compare Legendary to Gears of War, Call of Duty, Bad Company, or Far Cray 2, it is clearly not in the same league, much as I really wished it to be.  There are some great moments, but as a whole it falls very short.

Graphically there are a lot of issues.  While some of the creatures, especially griffins and minotaurs, look great, others like the werewolves which look like wererats, aren’t as good.  Character modelling is pretty ordinary.  Your obligatory female side-kick Vivian Kane, when she isn’t just a voice directing you, looks very much like the blow-up doll I got at my buck’s party.

Enemy soldiers look like something from an old B-grade sci-fi show from the sixties, and no matter how many of your own NPC soldiers die, they seem to be resurrected because they all look so generic.  They are also often mysteriously incorporeal.  You can walk right through them all as if they weren’t there.  The way they fight, they might as well not be!

The environments have a greyish or bluish tinge with bland textures and low detail and if you look too closely it’ll get very blurry.  There is some serious clipping, with wobbly bodies stuck halfway through the solid concrete debris, falling bits of building plummeting through the intact floor, and if I had a dollar for every time someone or something simply disappears for no apparent reason, I’d be pretty happy.

Everything seems to be made of straight lines and looks blocky.  Cookie-cut grass, though it sometimes sways at least, is pretty poor these days.  Flickering pixels are just ugly.

The choice of New York as a starting and ending point really does not do the idea justice because when the action finally gets to England the more Gothic atmosphere of ruined stonework and cemeteries makes for a much richer environment for destructive minotaurs and packs of wall crawling werewolves.

However, for the most part we are treated to bland cliche video game environments including vents, warehouses, sewers, office buildings, and even -yes- research labs!! Yawn.

My pet peeve is back too: some windows shatter when shot or axed, while fragile objects like stairway lights are indestructible.  Only some items move like they should when hit like a computer or wooden hanging sign, while others don’t or move in ways they shouldn’t.

In one case I played soccer (without feet, because apparently Charles doesn’t have those either) with a rock.  It was like an inflatable ball!  If this is the “dynamic environment” they are describing on the back of the box, they have a very limited definition of the term.

Lighting, though varied, is static.  Your character doesn’t seem to cast any shadows and the NPCs cast unrealistic ones.  So, while lights flicker and shine through rotating fans, there doesn’t seem to be any interactive response between the environmental lighting and your character.  Water looks good, but again when you move through it there is no wave motion to indicate you have done so.

The story is disappointingly simple and the ending still has me confused.  That might just be because I’m pissed off that I strangely didn’t get my achievement points for finishing the game and so wasn’t that disposed to working it out.  Or it might be that it didn’t make much sense.  I suspect the latter.

So once the cool mythological aspect is out of the way you have two groups chasing control of the creatures that have been released, so they can subjugate the world (or what’s left of it).  One is evil; one is supposedly good.  Your team gives you rah-rah stirring speeches like: “This is it!  We win today or we die today!”.  Yay team.

Sound, after that rather good menu screen tune, falls down to the annoying level.  When ‘Token Female Side-kick’ gives you instructions, it sounds like she is speaking under water.  Truly.  The music you are forced to listen to every ‘tension’ moment is the same drums and guitar beat repeated until you are ready to scream.

When you swing your axe against almost anything (including enemies and ‘Token Female Side-Kick’) it ‘tings’ as if everything is made of metal.  There are some good atmospheric sounds like growling, screaming, and bells but these should be a given in today’s gaming worlds.

I really did enjoy a lot of the England section, even though it was old-school shooter stuff.  When I stepped into an old stone-building village square lit by a full moon and then fought desperately against hordes of wall-crawling werewolves dropping behind me and my men, yanking them away screaming to be massacred, it got the heart going.  Then watching the creatures jumping up buildings all over the place and then leaping behind some newly arrived enemy soldiers to do the same to them, got me really appreciating the game.

Moments like watching a griffin grab a guy by the head and fly away, activating machines that made creatures fight on my side (though most of these machines were poorly placed), and the ghostly vending machines that started throwing cans at me showed that the game concept really did have potential.

The little ‘experiments’ at the lab where you can activate drone soldiers and various creatures to fight it out in ‘gladiator’ fights, only to vaporise the winner with fire, shows a fun touch too. Too much lets Legendary down though.

The game is as linear as you can get with very little sense of an alive interactive world.  The Animus power is not much help and is a pain to fill up when you are constantly attacked by a flow of seemingly never-ending re-spawning enemies.  Constantly spawning enemies that kill you a lot is a last-gen technique to make a game seem longer, and is just not enjoyable anymore this generation.

I did enjoy fighting bosses like minotaurs and shooting rockets at griffins and the Kraken, but enemy soldiers who don’t die when you shoot right at them, having no cover system, feeling like you are loosely sliding around instead of running or walking (probably because Charles has no feet), poor checkpoint placement, and boring repetition of ‘open lock by holding x’ style play outweighs those moments.

The aiming is twitchy and even though you have a variety of weapons like pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and even a flamethrower, they don’t feel as meaty as they do in other games.  The grenades seem overpowered but it was fun watching enemy soldiers go flying miles into the air.  The Molotov cocktails often don’t seem to work though. The health meter is hard to read and not having a melee attack besides your Animus ‘force push’ was a mistake.

The game isn’t a total disaster it’s just that the shooter genre has moved on from this basic style of play.  A poster in the game reads “Dapperchap Retro: Everything old is new” and perhaps the developers were thinking along the same lines, but old-school still has to be done well.

Not every game needs to be new and innovative to be fun, but it does need to get what it does do right.  In another spot in the game a calendar displays a cutesy kitten with big eyes and the words “Don’t be a sourpuss” written on it.  To me it seems like  a desperate plea from the game-maker to the gameplayer, but unfortunately Spark has again left a sour taste in my mouth after another round of its well conceived but poorly executed games.

“5/10

©2008 David Hilton

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