Another one in the list of games that present themselves with a fun and interesting premise, and then simply do not deliver on it. Why does this happen so often? Every time this happens, the people behind the work must see it too, right?
I once again went into the game fully expecting to enjoy it because of the set-up alone. Sure it'll probably be a mediocre shooter, but mythical creatures running around urban environments is cool! Surely they'll have the griffons from the cover, the minotaurs, maybe harpies, imps, mermaids, dragons, chimeras, medusas, etc.
Nope! ♥♥♥♥ that I guess. Roughly 80% of this game is just shooting werewolves and guys with guns. This ♥♥♥♥ is actually mindboggling. The game has an absolutely miniscule bestiary, but they couldn't even be bothered to use anything but werewolves outside of a few specific sections. The minotaurs? I'm pretty sure there's like 5 across the entire game. Griffons? You only really fight two of them, and it only happens over halfway through the game. Most of the time you will also simply one shot them with a rocket launcher.
You know, why do all that cool mythical ♥♥♥♥ when we could have an Xbox take on The Da Vinci Code? There's an evil guy who obviously named after Anton LaVey (the Church of Satan guy) and he wants to conquer the world by flooding it with all these creatures and then controlling them all with the evil science machine. Naturally, he is a part of an old secret order that has its own ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ paramilitary with gunships and everything.
It feels like such an absurd waste, and I feel like it stings even more because there are brief flashes of brilliance, of thoughtful design, or ambition. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with some of the devs being ex-MoH guys, but it does have the spirit of AAA shooters of that era. They keep up the pace, they keep throwing you some surprisingly gorgeous backgrounds. Even though it's all janky as ♥♥♥♥, you can tell it was a big production because set pieces have a real sense of scale to them.
There is almost always something cool happening around you. A giant golem made of cars and ♥♥♥♥ absolutely demolishing a tall building and walking through it. Cars and people getting picked up and tossed around by the griffons. There's also lots of fighting just happening everywhere. Some of it just an illusion of action, some of it is thanks to constant flood of allied dudes whose primary purpose is to get killed (by one of many werewolves) in some dramatic fashion. They were clearly proud of all the AI beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of each other, because one of the levels straight up lets you have little AI vs AI battles, even if it's pretty small scale.
Even the boring "shoot dudes" chapters have some cool spectacle to them! Like when you get to this game's version of Half-Life 2 citadel, you ride up the elevator and get a sense that there's two armies inside this building ripping each other apart. At one point a gunship appears just outside the window, but your allies swing in on helichopters and save you with apocalypse still raging in the background. A level before that has a kraken absolutely demolishing Big Be- sorry, The Great Clock of Westminster and it looks sweet as hell. This bombast is probably the only redeeming quality of this game, and its biggest charm point. All of the pieces are often clunky and unrefined, but you can feel the passion and ambition behind it.
---
Unfortunately there's still a game part here and it sucks ass. Legendary is mostly a standard console era shooter. You carry two primaries, have a melee axe, and two types of throwables (molotov and grenades). You also have one of the most pathetic jumps in video game history, to a point where it might as well not be there.
There aren't that many guns in the game, a total of something like 8, but you only need like two. Shotgun is good for werewolves, and this game is mostly werewolves. Then the second slot is for anything long range to shoot army dudes, since those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hurt a lot, at least on hard, so you wanna pick them off from a distance one by one. Roughly halfway through they start putting down SAWs everywhere, and since it's somewhat of a power weapon, you can just use that for the rest of the game.
One of the big gimmicks here is your special branded hand, but it's basically just an on-demand health pack. Killing mythical enemies has them drop a ball of energy, you can then suck up that energy and store a certain amount. Full tank is roughly enough to heal full bar of health and still have a little left. Early on they point out that you can use it for combat, but why would you ever? It spends a lot of energy for a short range attack that doesn't do all that much in a game where you always have guns with lots of ammo.
At one point they flirt with the idea of werewolves turning into ghost werewolves who need to be first blasted with energy to make the materialize, but it's used only twice across the entire game.
What sucks is that they were still trying to do something interesting here. Each mythical enemy has something unique going for them in terms of AI behavior. Werewolves, for example, will not die unless you decapitate them or blow off their head. They can also fling some objects in the environment and run on walls or ceiling. The firedrakes have a whole set of attacks (flamethrower, AoE stomp, arcing projectile with AoE explosion) and will often require extinguishing their spawn point. There are little fairies that need to materialize before you can attack them, and in ghost form they can possess props to throw them at you. It's rare to get this much creativity in a mid shooter. At most you usually get two types, the stationary shooting dudes and melee dudes who will rush towards you.
It's just never used to create interesting encounters, and I'm not sure that's even possible with how this game functions. Usually meaningfully combining multiple enemy types requires movement and levels built around it. Legendary rarely gives you something resembling a proper arena, it's more into the CoD/MoH school of naturalistic corridors that have you constantly going forward.
The movement in this game is also ass in a somewhat funny way. Like it easily has one of the worst jumps in video game history, it's genuinely pathetic. The sprint also feels like a concession of some sort, because while it's fast, I've never seen a sprint bar in an FPS that takes this long to regenerate. I think even stamina in Souls games comes back faster than sprint in this game, and you use roughly 25% of it every time you sprint jump. This ensures that you can't consistently outrun enemies, and even sprinting somehow wasn't enough in some situations. Combining more enemies in Legendary would likely simply result in much messier fights, and not some interesting combination of threats that forces you to adjust positioning, movement patterns, weapon choice, and target priority.
The result is a game with interesting enemies but with combat that is overall unremarkable in just about every way, and you'll be doing a lot of combat here.
---
If they had just stuck to premise I think this would've been easier to recommend, but as it stands you're probably better off playing Hellgate London or Secret World if you want something like urban fantasy shooter. I still gotta replay Will Rock but I'm pretty sure it's also a much better alternative. Still kinda sad that they never got to make a sequel to this, but considering how Lost Planet 3 and Ninja Gaiden Z turned out, I'm not sure the sequel would be any better than the first game.
