Review: Legendary

Origin is a digital download and social gaming service by Electronic Arts.

• Developer: Spark Unlimited
• Played: 2013
• Price: Five Bucks
• Platform: PC

The Premise

Mythical creatures are real, but have been trapped in Pandora's Box for a while. They are released (by yours truly) in the present day and start trashing the planet. It's up to you to save the world by shooting griffons in the face with a machine gun.

Things That Work

• It's a cool concept. Guns (and some magic powers) vs werewolves, minotaurs, etc.
• The mythical beasts and the obligatory PMC soldiers sometimes fight each other instead of you.
• The game didn't crash.

Reasons It's A Crap Game

This section isn't a bullet-point list, because there's too much ground to cover. If it were a bullet-point list, it would look something like this:

• Not enough enemy variety
• Annoying enemies
• Bad gameplay scripting
• Unskippable cutscenes
• Nonsensical plotline

But it's not a bullet-point list. So first off, let's talk about enemies. Throughout the game, you'll fight the same half-dozen enemy types over and over and over and over and over and over again. You've got your run-of-the-mill werewolf, your bigger large-and-in-charge werewolf, some kind of pixie, an evil PMC soldier, an evil PMC soldier with a flamethrower, and a fire monster. To round things out, there are two minibosses (the minotaur and the griffon), and the final boss (a Kraken wrecking London). Not a fantastic amount of variety, but it could be worse I suppose.

More egregious is the tedium of combat and the lackluster game scripting. Put simply, fighting the monsters isn't very fun, and you'll spend a lot of time doing it. The minotaur's charge will temporarily blot out your screen with pure red, allowing the monster to hit you repeatedly while you're unable to see. Enemies in general are nothing more than bullet sponges, meaning that combat devolves into a cycle of sprint, shoot, sprint, shoot. Gun accuracy and overall feel are very poor; the best tactic is typically to sprint into point-blank range, unload, then sprint to cover as needed.

The level design and scripting range from painfully linear to straight-up bad. Exterior street levels are literally mazes of cars and debris that cannot be jumped over. Patches of fire that would typically cause a small amount of damage are used in some places as an impassable barrier with no visual distinction. Unskippable scripted sequences are habitually placed directly after checkpoints and directly before battles. At one point I saw on-screen enemies simply disappear as scripted reinforcements loaded in.

The plotline doesn't make much sense to begin with and heads downhill from there. As best I can (I started having trouble paying attention about halfway through the game) tell, the evil PMC wants to use the mythical beasts to take over what's left of the world. Your final objective in the game is to prevent the PMC from activating the MacGuffin which will allow them to control the monsters. Oddly, however, the monsters start acting in concert with the PMC before the device is actually activated. I can only assume the writers stopped paying attention around the same time I did.

Last but not least, UNSKIPPABLE CREDITS.

Conclusions

It's a bad game with a good premise. It's not worth five bucks. Don't bother.