X-Men Legends

THE BAD:
Cutscene graphics look too cartoony. The fighting (except for boss battles) quickly gets repetitive. Puzzles aren't too complicated. Character combos aren't all that impressive. Some character dialogue quickly gets repetitive. Menus are complex. Short but frequent loading when accessing menus get annoying.

SUMMARY:
The latest entry into the X-Men franchise allows you to control up to 4 X-Men at a time in various missions against Magneto, Mystique, and other legendary X-Men villians. The story revolves around Allison, a young girl whose mutant powers have just begun to reveal themselves and now both the good guys and the bad guys want her for their own respective purposes.
The graphics are very good except in the cutscenes, where close-up the characters appear a bit on the cartoonish side, more like they were just cut and pasted in the scene. They also lack details especially in their faces. Environments show excellent detail and the movie cutscenes are realistic-looking. The character voices are excellent and accurately reflect each character's personality, like Cyclops' slightly whiny leadership style and Wolverine's "let's go bub" aggressive style. There's a lot of star power behind the voices too, including the talents of Dee Baker, Cree Summer, Ed Asner, and His Royal Baldness Patrick Stewart, among others (sorry guys, but no Rebecca Romijn voice for Mystique). The enemies have their own dialogue too but it's minimal and quickly gets repetitive. Sound effects are realistic and excellent.
Controls are fairly solid but it does take practice learning how to use each character's mutant powers. You can do combos with 2 or more characters but it's too much effort for too little reward. The big thing with gameplay is that you will not believe the amount of destructible objects there are. Although it's an important part of the game, it's just fun going around trashing everything in sight! There are puzzles to solve as well, but they're limited to finding the right character then using the correct Mutant power. Additionally, while you can play by yourself, the game allows up to 4 people to join in anytime during a game, each controlling their own character! There are also a handful of multiplayer versus options as well, which also allow players to control various villain characters like Mystique, Toad, & others.
Overall, while it's clearly the best next-gen X-Men title yet, it does fall short of expectations despite some really nice features. X-Men fans will still have fun with this, as will anyone who just needs to blow off a little stress...as they can just take it out on everything in sight! Rent this first unless you're into the franchise.

THE BAD:
Well with the cell shading, it was also an excuse for the makers to not add much detail to the characters.

And the camera angles are hard to get used to.

That's about it...

SUMMARY:
This game is a pretty good buy for anyone that is either into RPG's or X-Men. Because it is an excellent combination of both, and further more, addicting.