Legendary

Accept that Legendary won’t wow you with the gameplay polish of a budget-busting title, and you’ll likely have a good time fighting to shut Pandora’s precious package.

When I first heard of Legendary I was honestly very excited for the concept of shooting mythological creatures and monsters with guns because it is a rare concept. The final product has me on the fence with is it a worth while game to recommend for first person shooter nuts like me, or to leave it be and forget you ever saw it. As a person who enjoys Clive Barker’s Jericho for its unique first person shooter story and gameplay mechanics I would say this is an easy rental.

Everything about Legendary from the story to the set pieces screams epic proportions and honestly I really wanted to like the game a lot more. However, the small setbacks really take away from the experience and cause the game to go from legendary (pun highly intended) to just plain decent.

Legendary isn’t the most involved or technically excellent shooter to come out this season—Left 4 Dead and Gears Of War 2 outclass it. But it’s a fun change of pace with some extremely satisfying combats.

Legendary is an acceptable, sometimes frustrating game, a simple entertainment until the great first-person shooters of the year are released.

Spark has produced a shooter that crams as many fun monsters and insane action packed scripted events as possible into one game and lets gamers shoot them to their hearts content, which makes it perfect for a weekend rental.

Legendary is by no means awful — it’s just about as vanilla as first-person shooters get. It all wraps up with a completely unsatisfying “wait for the sequel” type cliffhanger. We’ll see.

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.

Beside some drawbacks in graphics and speech the idea around Pandoras box - for itself really great - cannot get off. The world isn't really interacting with the player, the gameplay is very sterile.

A frustrating mix of good and bad - we'd take it over "Blacksite" and co though. [Christmas 2008, p.63]

The problem with this is that Spark is relentless at throwing a huge number of beasties your way, crowding you into a corner and ripping you to shreds. There's not enough breathing space for you to heal yourself and absorb energy to use it effectively as a defensive measure. To say this had us throwing the controller at the telly and cursing is an understatement.

Spark has made a better game this time around than its previous attempt but it still isn’t on par with the elite of the genre. In the end, Legendary is a cool idea wrapped inside an average shooter.

There are just way too many better shooters available to make this game worth your time and money.

Even though this game is built on top of a great mythology, the one about Pandora's Box unleashing chaos onto the world when opened, developer Spark never manage to make the actual game interesting in any way. The game structure is linear, the presentation is bleak at best and the gameplay is rather poor. This sums up to one mediocre experience.

Though it brings gusto, wit and a sharp eye for horror cliches, Legendary is still at its core a clunky, mediocre first-person shooter that’s likely to vanish under the mountain of topnotch actioners shipping this month.