Legendary

The dev team has an eye for spectacle – a towering golem comprised of cars and other metallic detritus is a visual highlight – but these moments mostly serve to illustrate how dull your actual actions are by contrast. [Dec 2008, p.98]

A game that simply doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Constantly spawning enemies. A lead character with no hands. Unskippable cut-scenes you must continually sit through. Solid walls that light can leak through. NPCs that can be shot at, but not harmed. Action sections that feel like a movie you just happen to be walking through, and not interacting with.

What we've ended up with is a shambles, a game that looks boring and plays badly - a game that feels as ancient as the mythical beasts that you must vanquish.

Every hour, you are presented with the ideas that the developer had but simply couldn’t afford, and that only serves to make Legendary’s unrelenting run-and-gun approach harder to swallow. [Christmas 2008, p.96]

The overall experience left us with a bad taste in our mouths and an almighty “WTF?” resonating from our lips. Sigh.

So many cliches, so little time. [Issue#40, p.103]

Constantly spawning enemies… Solid walls that light can leak through… A bad first-person shooter experience.

This frustratingly bad first-person shooter is not the stuff legends are made of.

All together, Legendary had a decent idea behind it that's been marred by some poor design decisions. Shooting and controls feel ok, but everything you shoot at, interact with, or run through is lackluster, broken, or just plain boring.

All things told, the game reeks of derivation.

The gameplay comes across as messy and incomplete, the arrangement of hazards and threats from monsters is ineffective at best and boring at worst.

By the time I'd defeated my 10th werewolf, I was already tired of needing to cut or shoot its head off so it didn't regenerate. By the time I defeated my 200th, I just wanted to turn the game off.

Legendary is the gaming equivalent of cheap supermarket own-brand beans, but instead of costing eleven pence it costs the same as a prime steak cooked by a top chef. It's a bad, bad game. One of the worst I've played on this generation of consoles, in fact. In that regard, at least, the title is surprisingly accurate.

The basic ideas behind Legendary were quite sound. Unfortunately it seems they were never properly realised, instead cobbled together with the digital equivalent of shredded newspaper and masking tape.

Legendary is something of a marvel. While I've played a lot of terrible first-person shooters, I never realized that there would be one that missed the mark so completely.