Looking at the video games released by publisher Gamecock Media there's a serious dearth of quality as of late, original ideas that simply aren't executed well in terms of gameplay. Not all of it is Gamecocks fault though; some of it is a well earned reputation on the part of the developers themselves. Spark Unlimited has shown an impressive penchant for coming up with great ideas, filling them with impressive set pieces and then botching the execution. Like so.
Legendary follows the story of Deckard, an art thief by trade, who is brought into the employ of a man named LeFey. He is hired to make his way into a museum in New York and to open a box there with a strange key that is given to him. Unfortunately his hand is trapped in a panel on the box while being painfully branded with a signet while magical energy erupts from what is apparently Pandora's Box. All of the evils in the world take the shape of Werewolves, Gryphons, Minotaur's and even a gigantic Golem. Of course the signet on Deckard's hand is a key to this whole situation as well as a tool to help him undo what he has accidentally caused.
Making this game even more frustrating is that it starts out really good. Some of the coolest set pieces you could ever imagine will greet you as you run through the streets of New York watching as the ground tears due to magical energy. Soon enough Gryphons fill the air, destroying things and snatching up humans as food. On the streets a Golem forms itself out of debris and parked cars before smashing its way through a building while in the Subways trains are careening out of control due to being set on fire by flaming rock monsters, Firedrakes. It's actually pretty breathtaking to behold all of the chaos and carnage.
However the game starts to rip at the seams a bit as you get into the underground. With the motif of go to door, hack the nearby door panel to open it, crawl through tunnels to find switch to shut off electricity so you can continue the tasks are no more repetitive than Half-Life. The weakness here is that the environments just aren't very interesting when you're underground and you spend a good four hours, out of the ten or so the game lasts, going through tunnels of some sort.
Things are much more interesting when you're out in the wide open with a number of varied locations. The main problem here in these areas is that the enemies actually get boring very quickly. Most of your time is spent fighting Werewolves, Firedrakes and soldiers and that's all you will see for most of the game. When the bigger monsters are finally introduced it might be a breath of fresh air until you realize that they're incredibly frustrating to fend off. They take far too much damage to fight up front and the game expects you to get behind them for some real damage. Of course doing so is tricky since there's nowhere to hide from them and you're left running around like a chicken without its head turning this into more of a chore than anything.
Possibly the biggest failing of the game developers are their reliance on frustrating areas full of respawning enemies. Let's explain this a bit.
The Signet on Deckards hand allows him to gather energy from the monsters he kills that can be used to fire an energy blast or heal himself. But it can also be used to charge up machinery by transferring your energy to said machine. This lends itself to no less than three areas of the game where you will face infinitely respawning enemies while trying to either get through an easy platforming section or charge up a device. These are incredibly frustrating since the enemies themselves can often be pretty tough in the waves they attack in so while you're trying to kill them for energy so you can power up the device you also need to gather energy to heal yourself. It gets pretty old pretty fast and I'm not sure how it passed the QA guys.
All of the areas, barring those underground ones, and the creatures are wonderfully done. It's almost worth the price of buying this game just to see New York totally torn apart by the creatures unleashed from the Box. It all looks rather incredible as debris falls and those nearby you are killed by the apocalyptic energies unleashed. Even if this does bring some minor slowdown in some areas it isn't that bad. Also the enemies have almost realistic movements to them which paired up with their fantastic appearances make them almost seem real. Well… as realistic as a gigantic eagle / lion hybrid can be.
Humans aren't so lucky, being burdened with rather horrible facial animations and stiff movements. Watching any of the human characters move around the battlefield is a cringeworthy situation to say the least. At least we know who the real stars of this game are. Even the mostly good backgrounds show signs of tearing and texture pop-in on a rare few occasions. This might be part of the Unreal Engine but the slowdown is definitely a problem with the game itself.
One thing that's definitely appreciated about the presentation of this game is the audio. Most of the game has a pretty nice soundtrack to accompany the exciting moments and the main theme is a pretty cool guitar instrumental. In addition to that the voice acting is surprisingly good. It's nothing that compares to some of the big money blockbusters but it is much better than you might expect and it doesn't do anything to actually hamper the narrative.
While the game itself shows promise the online mode is pretty much a lost cause. With only one game mode, four maps and nobody playing online it's impossible to even play multiplayer. It's a shame that more wasn't done with this since the ideas at play here are pretty good. Having two competing teams fighting each other while also fending off the attacks of a respawning pack of werewolves works pretty well but the options given are too limited for this to last. Paired up with the absolute lack of replay value you're not getting a whole lot of value for your money.
Legendary's problems would be easily forgivable if the rest of the package came together well enough but it doesn't. With only four different enemies to fight for most of the game (one is a second breed of Werewolf), a mostly useless selection of guns and annoying bosses paired up with a story that doesn't go anywhere the game fumbles its execution totally. It's even more infuriating to receive an ending that's essentially a "to be continued" message. Luckily the price has dropped to make it a bargain bin title which is more of a comfortable fit for this game. You could do worse but you could also do much better in a year that's seen a large number of excellent titles released in short order.