Developer: Spark Publisher: Gamecock Release Date: November 4th, 2008

I’ll see your generic game and RAISE you a generic game…with werewolves.

As good as I am at ripping bad games a new pie-hole, I never really enjoy having to do it. It means that A) a bad game further solidifies my jaded attitude towards the industry, and B) I just had to sit and play a bad game. And that sucks. Hard.

In this week’s podcast I compared playing this game to getting drunk, passing out and waking up underneath a pile of old naked men. Disturbing? You bet. True? I’m afraid so.

I know you wanna keep reading. It’s my sinister yet comfortable writing style.

So let’s go.

Gosh. Where do I start? Alright. First I’ll tell you what the game has in common with every other FPS ever: everything. Next I’ll tell you what, of these commonalities, the game does horribly: everything.

Jesus. I have to expand on that don’t I?

Well, the premise is at least interesting, in that dull kind of way. You play Jack Deckard, an art thief for hire who has been given the task of stealing Pandora’s Box for a muti-billionaire. As you attempt this heist, everything of course goes wrong and you’re stuck with a strange signet on your hand and an even more strange blond with a vague Eastern European accent. The signet absorbs the energy, or ‘Animus’, from fallen enemies to use as either health or energy weapon. It’s slightly better than health packs I suppose. Around halfway through the game, there is a switch of loyalties in the storyline and you continue on like nothing has happened, which makes sense because really nothing has. Maybe if the main characters weren’t cardboard cutouts of real people, I would care about what happens to them. But they’re never really built up in the first place, so there’s not much to expand upon. As far as interaction with NPCs, all I can say is ‘don’t expect any’. All you do is watch them die in various, expected ways. Rad.

The graphics are reminiscent of a generation-one Xbox 360 game that’s actually an updated port of a Nintendo 64 game. Nuff’ said there, I think.

The enemies are intriguing enough – Werewolves, Griffins, Minotaurs and the like are the things that made us quiver and shake when we were very young. And those fears might have been conquered if there was a  capable control scheme in place. Why is it that an art thief can only jump several inches off the ground? Is he carrying Orson Wells on his shoulders the whole time? It’s set up like every other FPS and yet feels so foreign. Nearly every enemy encounter consists of enemies respawning a fixed number, or respawning until you can use the environment to stop their appearance. So as you’re trying to figure out where the hell you’re going, how are you going to get there, and just what the hell is this game anyways, fire lizards keep rolling around shooting molten rocks at you. There are so many dead ends and cheap deaths for something as simple as going from one side of the room to another it’s infuriating. You don’t even want to explore, which is okay because exploration usually doesn’t get you anything anyways.

Now onto the level design and your interaction with the environment. This is what kills the whole game. I have literally played every one of the environments in Legendary in other FPS (nice sewer, that’s different). In fact there is not one original stage idea in the entire game. These are things I could deal with if the cliched areas in question were done well – unfortunately they were not. The environments are extremely linear in design and boxed in. Even when you’re outdoors, there really isn’t any place to go except that which has been predetermined by the developers. What fun. Going from room to room is annoying for god’s sake. There is literally only three ways to open a door: 1) open it, 2) blast it open with magical hand powers, or 3) hold down a button to watch a ten second animation of you connecting two wires together and waiting. Unfortunately, is the latter seventy-percent of the time. Then there is the clutter that is strewn about every stage. A little overdone detail isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but when I’m getting hung up on small irrelevant objects whilst outrunning a giant whatever, it kills the fun by leading to even more cheap deaths.

The best thing about the game are the weapons. Not because they’re interesting or exciting to use, but because they aren’t atrocious. Yep, that’s the bar that’s been set. Awesome. I would usually use this space to berate the developers for creating this pile. But I’m sure their shame follows them around like an old hobo they made the mistake of feeding once.

That’s it. The only reason this didn’t get a 1 are those handful of moments that are actually fun (as few and far between as they are), which indicates that someone was actually doing their job until the others locked them in a closet for the remainder of the development cycle.

That would explain a lot actually.

Anyways. Yeah, pile of old naked men. Stay away.

Overall: 3 out of 10

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