Legendary
Monday, February 9, 2009
Spark Unlimited is the developer of previous games such as Call of Duty: Finest Hour and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. After Fall of Liberty many fans lost their confidence in them. Does the game Legendary make up for it? Read on and see …
Monster in a box
Legendary is about the professional thief Charles Deckard who got a job by a mysterious organization named “The Order”. His job was to steal an artifact from a museum in New York. Little did Deckard know that he would actually steal Pandora’s Box, When Deckard opens the box he also let loose a lot of mythological monsters but also gains the power of “The Signet”. This power seems to be the key to the whole adventure, and it’s now up to Deckard to save the world.
It’s hard to like Legendary, I’m sorry Spark Unlimited but that is the way I feel. There are so many negative aspects and only a few positive. The story of Legendary is acceptable even though the prologue leaves many questions unanswered, eg If the owners of the museum knew the dangers of the Pandora’s Box or even the legend, why wasn’t more guards guarding the artifact? There many events that seems completely illogical in the game that makes you lose faith in the game from the start. However the game lights up a bit when the panic kicks off and monsters starts to rampage the New York streets. However on my way out on the streets I kept wondering why there was several mysterious organizations here when hell breaks loose, fewer police officers well that’s acceptable but where is the army? Where are all the hundreds of hundreds ground troops? Nothing, it’s a bit illogical in my eyes.
Finally a weapon!
Basically Legendary is a traditional first-person shooter, and when I write traditional, I mean no cover system, no prone, ie the ability to lie down or some sort of concern about ammunition. Not that we do not have ammunition, the thing is that somehow ammo-boxes are placed all over New York, even in subways stations. Even in places where there are only civilians and no soldiers. Hell broke loose for five minutes ago and they have already deployed ammo to the people, impressive.
It’s hard for me to like the animations or the weapons in this game, if you throw a Molotov cocktail the bottle will not actually rotate when you throw it, it just flies through the air in an unnatural manner and trajectory. All weapons you throw in the game feels kind of unnatural. Handguns and rifles feels okay though, but I still feel like it’s not that much fun to shoot enemies. In a game where shooting stuff is the actual main aspect of the game it’s pretty critical to nail that part.
To complement all the weapons there you have a power that allows you to collect the energy from the enemies you’ve killed, and with this energy, you can heal yourself and perform other moves such as a shock wave, throwing enemies and objects. Which is pretty sweet. There are some puzzles in the game, these puzzles are usually about turning a some levers which opens a door somewhere, or open doors by linking two wires behind a broken panels. I feel like these puzzles acts like annoying obstacles between the action-sequences.
The monster have pretty nice models and animations and sounds. In the graphics department we have the Unreal 3.0 engine, and the game itself looks pretty good.
Final words:
There is very little to say about Spark Unlimited games Legendary, basically the game is under today’s standard. Legendary is game where you half-way through can’t remember why you’re actually playing. It’s a bit sad, because when I read about it when the previews I was really hyped. I mean mythological creatures? That’s awesome, I like the story somewhat I feel that it could be a great game if given more time, but as it is , it’s really hard to like.
