TL;DR Verdict – Legendary is classic 7th gen bargain bin nonsense for better or worse (and in this case it’s overwhelmingly for worse). Bare-bones shooting mechanics, limited AI, a barely noticeable soundtrack and a highly linear series of corridors combine to create a forgettable FPS experience with little to recommend it. While it does have it’s (rare) moments, Legendary is more akin to a B-movie than a blockbuster. Yet in spite of everything, I don’t hate this game and think it’s more indicative of how developers of the time couldn’t get away with schlocky bandwagon games any more.
Legendary is, for want of a better description, a very slapdash game that seems to have been put together by a team that had grandiose albeit unfulfilled ambitions. It starts off with International Art-Thief Deckard taking instructions from Posh English Lady Veronica after Deckard opens up Pandora’s Box on the instructions of a sinister benefactor. To the surprise of no one, this doesn’t go well and causes chaos to ensue as the world finds itself under attack by swarms of Gryphons in the air and legions of fire lizards on the streets. The opening of the game is unintentionally(?) very silly, as the player has no real control over anything and must plod along while explosions and choreographed scenes of hungry hungry gryphons chomping through civilians keep playing out in front of them. The whole thing feels more like an interactive Michael Bay movie than anything, as buildings collapse, fires break out and everyone freaks out while you stumble around like a disaster movie Forrest Gump.
Eventually proud American Deckard finds a pistol just lying around, which introduces the first red-flag of the game as it becomes apparent that we’re dealing with yet another 2-weapon limit FPS game. In addition to this, a second red flag is raised as it’s revealed that the max amount of ammunition you can carry for each weapon is pretty limited. As such you will be constantly coming across guns, which is a touch out of place for a game that has two settings – New York and jolly old England. Fortunately(?) as Legendary proceeds we discover that there are barely any weapons to worry about, as the game has a very, very standard FPS game load out. There are a whole SEVEN weapons to keep track of, which at least are very creative and show that the developers invested time into making this an interesting and varied FPS game that stands the test of time and is still worth playi-
Hahahahaha nah I’m taking the piss, you get a pistol, SMG, shotgun, assault rifle, heavy machine gun, flamethrower and rocket launcher (3rd red flag) with the last two on that list only appearing for the last hour of the game.
This is made even worse as these two weapons don’t give you any real reason to use them outside of 3 sections in which they are mandatory, as ammunition is limited and they perform worse in most situations than other weapons you already have. You do also have a melee weapon but much like the pistol, it instantly gets forgotten about as soon as you have the SMG/Shotgun power combo which are for dealing with human and mythical creature enemies respectively. The human enemies are nothing to write home about, as they have very basic AI and are limited to the range of weapons that you have access to. In spite of them being incredibly dumb, they are still the biggest threat in the game as they have hit-scan weapons and instantaneous reaction times (the 4th red flag, who likes hit-scan???) which means that they can quickly shred through your plot armour. They don’t have much health and go down to a few blasts from the iron-sights of most guns, but in a case of yet another red flag your aim sensitivity sky-rockets the more you zoom in. As such utilising the scope on the Assault Rifle is a real pain in the backside.
The same can also be said about most of the enemy creatures, none of which are very threatening as they deal modest amounts of damage but can be absorbed for free health when they die. This is because Deckard is marked with a totally sick tattoo sigil after opening Pandora’s Box which lets him harvest and store monster souls Animus Vitae from dead mythical creatures as a type of portable medic kit. He also has the ability to perform a modest AoE stun, but honestly why stun when you can gun?
As such the enemy creatures function as unruly healing supplies and each have their own unique annoyances. You’ve got the fire lizards which deal a bit of AoE damage if they die too close to you and that have a nasty habit of spawning infinitely from blazing fires in the early areas (at least until you utilise the magic E button on your keyboard to activate various glowing objects to extinguish those fires). You’ve got the werewolves which are a pushover when using the shotgun but will regain all their health if you don’t shoot their head when they go down, which can be annoying when dealing with a group of them (or when they rag-doll into a spot that makes hitting their head near impossible as their big fat bodies are in the way). Then you’ve got the two other types of Werewolf, namely the Alpha werewolf which just has much more health, plus the Ghost werewolf which only appears twice in the entire game but requires you to double-tap your ability key to use that aforementioned stun which makes them vulnerable.
Carrying on you’ve got the Nari which are the most sinister enemy in the game due to the fact that they are invulnerable except when about to attack and can phase through walls, but they have very little health so they’re still more of a hassle than a threat. You’ve also got the very tanky Gryphons and Minotaurs both of whom essentially function as mini-bosses due to their very high health pools and identical attack patterns (they walk at you and try to hit you, OR they run at you while destroying objects in the way and try to hit you). Rounding things off you’ve got uh… tentacles which have low health but are almost impossible to avoid due to the narrow spaces you’re in, with the developers deliberately placing them so that they grab you at short notice. Should you fail to shoot them while grabbed quickly enough they’ll instantly kill you, but this only happened once to me so I wouldn’t worry about it much. Last and certainly least, you’ve got egg sacks queen blood spiders which spawn little scurrying ticks blood spiders endlessly until you shoot them. I’m willing to forgive the tentacles as they do add a tiny sense of foreboding to the overwhelmingly frequent sewer sections (6th reg flag!) but the blood spiders can suck ma boab.
Fortunately you don’t need to face all these threats alone, as shortly after being betrayed by their mysterious benefactor – who is part of an illuminati-esque group called The Black Order – our dynamic duo team up with a group called The Council who are a different but less evil illuminati secret society. This means that you often get to team up with generic FPS mooks who don’t have helmets due to the fact that they barely have brains worth protecting. They are very, very dumb and really only serve as a distraction for enemies, but due to the aforementioned hit-scan baddies this actually makes them pretty useful. Unfortunately they die in one creature attack and have a bad habit of throwing grenades at themselves. You shouldn’t feel guilty for letting them get killed though as they manage to not only die 24/7 in the cutscenes but also die constantly due to multiple “cinematic” instances that occur during gameplay where temporarily invulnerable enemies pull off scripted kills. According to the DEEP LORE of Legendary both the Black Order and The Council are comprised of ELITE special forces infantry but honestly Deckard is the only person in the game with an IQ above room temperature, and even then he literally opens pandora’s box so it’s fair to say that everyone in this game is perpetually drooling on themselves.
As for this DEEP LORE most of it is contained within your handy PDA (a twee reminder that this game was made before the nightmarish combination of social media and smartphones ruined everyone’s minds) which serves as a repository of shallow information. It turns out that the Black Order are seeking to control the creatures that are trying to eat everyone, that The Council think this is a bad idea and that the head commander of The Council is a dorky military type who might not be trustworthy. It also contains very, very basic descriptions of each weapon (e.g. The pistol is a basic semi-automatic weapon that doesn’t deal much damage, Molotovs are cheap and deal damage over time, the Heavy Machine Gun is big and good at shooting things but takes a while to reload etc.) and a bunch of notes and generic flavour text which are generally two or three sentences long per entry. Most of them are variations on “COR BLIMEY GUV’NA THERE BE MONSTERS WE GOTS TO LEAVE I RECKON” or “DEAR MY WIFE I AM TRAPPED IN THE BUILDING AND THERE ARE SPOOKY WEREWOLVES I WILL DIE BUT I LUV U D:” or “CHARLIE TEAM ECHO BRAVE HAS SECURED THE EVAC ZONE SEMPER FIE” although I did find the one saying “I shouldn’t have called you crazy for having all those guns” to be pretty funny.
At this stage there really isn’t much more that can be said about Legendary because, well, it’s only got 6 levels (7th red flag, so there are more red flags in this game than levels) and so I beat it in under 5 hours. It’s probably worth pointing out this was after encountering a crash-to-desktop bug and another bug which causes you to fall through an elevator’s floor to your death (pro-tip, stand in the corner next to the control panel) with both of these occurring in the final level btw. I’d talk about the ending but [[[SPOILERS]]] the game abruptly ends on a quasi-cliffhanger immediately after you blow up the big bad guys doomsday machine, with the game basically saying “Then Deckard and Veronica realised that the illuminati are lame and so they escaped to tame the beasts the end :-D”. It’s abrupt to the point that it feels as if the developers planned to have an extra level or two where you team up with the beasts to fight the boring council dweebs and thus end both secret societies, but either Legendary ran out of budget or the QA department ran out of patience.
[[[SPOILERS OVER]]] but instead of further berating Legendary over it’s many, many flaws (like the laughably bad facial expressions, the frequent habit of NPCs to unbudging stare at walls with guns drawn or the utterly forgettable two-instrument aspiring to be rock soundtrack) I’d like to wind down this review by mentioning a handful of moments that actually managed to be amusing or cool. Firstly the Nari are little shits and they occasionally mess with you by possessing doors that you’re trying to open or locking you in an area while they try and kill you in creative ways, such as by turning on a big ventilation fan that sucks you in or using vending machines to throw soda cans at your face. Then you’ve got a segment later on in Legendary where you use homing missiles to lock onto and explode those pesky gryphons, which is silly and gave off real “Reign of Fire” vibes. Finally the section where the big bad guy dies is so excessively over-the-top that it’s earnestly amusing, he gets attacked by a werewolf, falls out of a window, gets picked up mid fall by a gryphon that attacks him and then impaled onto a big spike and electrocuted – with that big spike being part of a massive bomb that then explodes.
With those niceties over, I’ll summarise by saying Legendary is a pretty bad game that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Even if the FPS combat is just about serviceable and it’s true that there are a couple of cool enemies to shoot, the game is a bit of a mess. Everything about it is just so lacklustre in every aspect, from character animations to story to weapon selection to the level design through to the abrupt ending and obligatory multiplayer mode (that has 4, count em, FOUR maps).
I don’t regret playing through it as bargain bin games are the sorbet of any game players backlog, enabling them to appreciate the next game with a clear palette and appreciation for all the effort that’s involved in making a genuinely polished game. But with that being said, even if Legendary deserves the bad reviews I do still hope the people who made it did OK and went on to do better things as it’s clear that they tried their best to make a campy FPS game. Based on the tongue-in-cheek credits and the tiny departments involved, it’s obvious that this is just another example of PS2-tier developers struggling to successfully land the transition to the AAA dominated industry that the 7th console generation heralded.
