Legendary (PC) - Guest Post

Today on Super Adventures, mecha-neko makes a rare return from his self-imposed exile to write a guest post about a critically unloved 2008 first person shooter. If this isn't the most words ever written about Legendary in one place at one time, then the internet needs to stop writing so much about Legendary already. I mean seriously guys, give Zelda or Dark Souls some attention for once.

Hiya, guys.

Ray bought me a game that I've been curious about for the longest time, so I thought I'd better show you folks what it's all about! Say hello to Legendary, a first person shooter by Spark Unlimited.

(Click the images for super high resolution!)

All I could tell you about Spark off the top of my head is that they previously did a not-so-very-well-liked PC/360 first person shooter called Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. Everybody I know who's played it says Turning Point is terrible. Yet they've all finished it, which is a curious fact. I haven't tried it myself though.

Uh, this game's off to a great start by the way. The intro movies and cutscenes come out completely black while the game is fullscreen and there's no in-game option to fix it. Hit Alt-Enter to make it windowed or you won't have a clue what's going on.

"Pandora's Box, according to ancient myth, was a gift from the gods. A wedding present from a devious Zeus, delivered with the warning that it should never be opened. Of course, Pandora's curiosity proved too strong and she peeked inside, instantly releasing all the misfortunes of mankind into the world.

That was the myth. The truth, unfortunately, was far worse.

The real Pandora's Box was a device of incredible power. Ancient empires waged countless wars to possess it. Ultimately, a secret society called the Council of 98 hid the artifact from the world. For centuries, the artifact remained hidden, its location lost even to the succeeding generations of the Council.

In the early 21st century, treasure hunters recovered a strange relic from the ocean floor. Unable to identify its origin, they brought it to New York City for study."

A stranger creeps into the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, forcing his way through the security system to a basement holding room where a mysterious box awaits.

He retrieves an ancient key from his pack and examines the keyhole carefully. Nervously, he inserts the key, causing a hand-shaped recess to open in the side of the box...

Who is this man? And why is he here? For this we must flick over to the Legendary graphic novel comic book!

No booby-traps, no poison needles, he says, just a whole lot of glowing and whispering.

The thief is Charles Deckard, master swiper. Hired by a sinister secretive type to the tune of a briefcase full of money, his mission is to steal the contents of the mysterious box and get out undetected.

The boss is putting a lot of trust in Deckard, giving him the one and only key to this thing. It couldn't have been an easy thing to find. Pandora's Box? Sure, it's a great big golden whacking box that sounds like a bunch of cartoon characters are hiding inside describing their own secret plans, but the KEY? That must've taken decades to find.

And why does Deck need the key anyway? What's he planning to do? Put all the evils of the world inside that snappy suit? Surely the box itself is the prize? Is there a smaller box inside the bigger box?

It's doing weird stuff now... he's not going to stick his hand in that thing, is he?

Of course he is, because Deckard is an intergalactic idiot.

He gets off pretty lightly. It only spears a red-hot spike right through his hand and sears a mark into his flesh. Then when the box is done meddling, it blasts the thief across the room and starts getting a little restless.

I have unleashed all the evils of the world, now I must face the consequences...

The first evil Deckard must face is the worst of all: a compulsory controls tutorial where I have to prove I'm paying attention by using each control as it's described on screen. Just the thing to get me all fired up for the action to come.

I'm not sure if the game is trying to break up the tension with anticipation, but surely the obvious thing would have been to have the museum heist be the tutorial and the ensuing escape be the first part of the real game. Having the player activate the box puts the responsibility for the inevitable resulting chaos on them, so they would feel more involved in the resolution or the exploitation of it. I don't get it.

Worst of all, the box didn't even open properly! We're going to have to leave empty handed. I'll just leave the box there for now.

Its dark thirst for telling me which button is 'Crouch' sated for the time being, Pandora's Box starts firing out arcs of lightning at the walls (totally unlike any machinery you activate at the start in Half-Life) and opens a path leading back up to ground level (also unlike etc.).

I'm out of here!

Everything is falling apart around me now. The earth is shaking; veins of lava are spewing forth from the crumbling stone walls. Time to get gone!

The security shutters in this place are atrocious. Every time the game shows you a fire exit that would lead to the main vestibule, a gate falls down or rubble falls in your way. One pour soul was sliced in two by a falling shutter. Whenever I find some fellow survivors trying to escape this death-trap, they like to run under crumbling pots as they topple from pedestals and immediately crumple into bloody ragdolls. An admirable shirking of Health & Safety responsibilities all round.

I just realised that I'm not having to fight my way out! Deckard calmly walks around the museum watching it split into glowing lava pieces under his feet completely oblivious to the danger except for the blocks of masonry that keep falling on his head. But there are no mercs. There is no army of goons rappelling down and massacring civilians as they try to escape to cover it all up. In fact, the closest thing to a villain in this story is me because I'm the one who caused all this crap.

Deckard thankfully keeps his mouth shut. Not a single "Oh, I never meant for this." or "Why did this have to happen?" or "It's all my fault!" passes his lips because that would have made him a mopey git. If he starts feeling sorry for himself, I'll steer him right back into the museum and let him eat bricks.

Just when I think I'm about to get away with it all, a stream of light fires out of Pandora's Box beneath me, tearing a hole in the floor and creating a swirling vortex of energy that sucks up wreckage and bystanders alike and tosses them all right at my face.

As long as nothing else happens, right?

I'm officially upgrading this from 'accident' to 'misunderstanding'.

Scratch that, make it 'catastrophe'.

New objective? Escape from New York, preferably alive. The getaway driver is yelling at me on the radio to meet her a block away from here. If I'm lucky, I might make it there before the entire city falls down on top of us.

The heavy guitars are going chug-chug-chug-a-chugga-chug. This sounds cool and it looks cool. I'm liking all of this a lot. I can't help it! I love disasters, especially ones that unfold around me. I love escaping from things. Have you seen the War of the Worlds remake starring Tom Cruise? Lots of people running the hell away from exploding crap. Good pic!

And just ahead is something really awesome to escape from...

A gryphon! Wahey!

Wait I mean, "Oh no! A scary monster! Quick, run!".

It's not just one gryphon, either. It's all the gryphons! They're materialising from the skies in flashes of bright red light, swooping down, picking up cars and flying off with them. The earthquakes are tearing the ground apart. All around me, anybody who can run is trying their best to get the hell out before a beast tears them apart. It is chaos. Woo!

I'm willing to give almost every game a go, but if you really want to get my hyped for a game, you show me this:

A man fighting off a massive gryphon with guns and magic powers in a modern day city. That's all it takes.

In Legendary, Pandora's Box doesn't contain all the ills of mankind but instead all the creatures of myth and legend. Every last one. Every creature from every culture, everything magnificent and everything fearsome. Why? Because it's damned a cool idea for a game, that's why.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on the DS was a wonderful game. It starts off with a bunch of kids in a city When Suddenly Demons and there's no escape. And you're right there in it the whole time, no time skips, no one-two-miss-a-few, every second is valuable and every decision counts. And then they made a second one! I was kinda hoping for a similar vibe to that in Legendary considering it has, y'know, the same premise.

Why is it so hard to find a game like that? Are modern cities, monsters and magic so incompatible?

I'm glad I don't have a weapon at this point, because I'm not sure I'd want to attack the gryphons. Not because I'm worried about becoming their lunch, but because they're that cool. Look, LOOK!

It's hard to see an uninteractive gryphon and not imagine the developers saying "We're saving these cool looking enemies for later - keep playing if you want to see more of our awesome looking gryphons!" They drive a hard bargain.

And this is the loading animation you get between levels. These guys clearly love their bird cats as well and rightly so.

Yeah! You guys had better run. Nobody would dare stand against the patriotic might of an FDNY fire-axe. Or they could be flying away from that horrific screeching noise behind me. Should I look?

Right. Uh... all the cars have become a giant metal golem. That was unexpected! An ancient creature reimagined for the modern day. Cool points gushing everywhere.

He's right on top of me! He's opening a path! Gosh, it's all so exciting!

Don't stick around too much, you'll ruin the already-fragile illusion. You don't want to see gryphons flying through each other and through walls. Nor do you want to see hideous human 'animation' as the characters instantly jerk between frames. Keep moving, stick with the tour group and don't bump your head on the plywood fake scenery. Cuddly gryphons are available in the gift shop (I wish... :().

And hey, at some point my super-observant protagonist found himself a pistol and a few dozen bullets. Might be enough to scare a gryphon, or take one down if I'm incredibly lucky.

There has to be a path out of here... right! Duck in-between the smashed up cars and scramble into the broken building to the side.

Off I go down the dark, dark corridor of death. Who knows what I will find within? Am I truly ready to do what is necessary to defend myself against any survivors who think that their survival is more important than my own? Will it be that kind of game? A world of desperate people doing desperate things?

This is a 'monsters appearing out of nowhere' kind of disaster, not a 'people turning into monsters' Parasite Eve or The Chaos Engine-style disaster, so if I encounter anybody at least there's going to be no tedious YOU'RE ONE OF THEM confrontations where everything could be avoided if everybody trusted one another a little more. Hate those.

Or is it going to be a linear sequence of entirely uninteractive gryphon attacks and You Must Shoot This Switch To Advance tutorial messages?

After a brief jumping tutorial, a somewhat disgruntled gryphon pokes his head out to see if I'm still paying attention. I take aim and unload the entire mag of my wonderful, accurate, extended-clip fast firing pistol point blank into the gryphon's eye. Nothing happens. Gah! I don't care if you are mythical! If someone fires a gun at your eyes you REACT.

But Legendary's gryphons do not react, for they are not real, and it is becoming painfully obvious. This is still the introductory cutscene. Scripted gryphons are flying in a looping cutscene above my head, occasionally bouncing off my face. You'll lose health if one hits you, but the gryphons are too busy being a scripted spectacle to care about a guy with a gun. Might as well be on some kind of ghost train ride. Legendary, you're doing 'scary' wrong.

The other survivors have all but disappeared now. I was imagining people trampling each other trying to get away. There's no screaming or noise but the gryphons and the chugga-chug guitars. It's kind of eerie. Did the gryphons eat everyone? This city will be covered in so much bird crap pretty soon. Yet another good reason to escape.

I am left wondering when I'll find my first actual enemy. Something I can interact with would be nice.

Over on a desk is a big glowing text log for me to add to my stash. There are text messages to be found all over the place, but they're mostly along the lines of "Shopping list: get some eggs. Oh, brb, monsters.", but one simply said "Dad, these fire lizards popped up around school. We're locked in the classroom. What should I do?". It made me sad.

The game yanks us out of this barely-interactive first person cutscene to show us a fully uninteractive prerendered third-person one instead. Tonight, on Legendary:

Oh no! Deckard is being chased by a nasty old gryphon!! Run, Chuck, Run! He gives it a blast of the old magic-eroonie and slams the conveniently placed solid bulkhead door shut. I didn't know he had a magic blast power! And neither did he! But now we do!

But where has Deckard found himself now? Another dark corridor, yay! The pretty, light colours of the dust-filled sky simply couldn't last, huh? We're going into the New York subway, certified 100% gryphon free.

"Why is this happening?" "We're safe now..."

Survivors! I'll just, uh, shuffle along silently back here hiding my glowing, satanic hand...

If you're going to have fire fights in underground corridors, you've gotta make them look as nice as you can.

Deckard creeps through the open door and the camera floats out of his brain to reveal my first adversary:

The mighty Firedrake! He's only a wee guy, the camera's making him look much bigger than he is.

The firedrake is a komodo dragon-like monster made of magma that can spew fireballs from its mouth. While the gryphons hail from the sky, these guys are from the ground, burrowing up from the Earth's core and claiming the subways as their home. Their favourite food is protagonists.

The firedrake crawls out of his hole, faces off against Deckard, and then something magic happens.

I have fun. I have a crapload of fun.

The firedrakes have got all manner of different attacks. They can roll up into a ball and hurl themselves at you. They can breathe fire. They can emit fiery shockwaves around themselves. They can leap up ledges and sneak up behind you. There might be a lot of identical enemies here, but they all act differently enough when you see them.

And the pistol? Oh man, is this a satisfying gun. Fires as fast as you like, makes a very nice bang, and kills these guys quick enough if you can hit them. I'm darting from one side of the platform to the other, giving the drakes hell as they spew out of the ground, drilling them until they make a gratifying rumbly pop and spew out some yummy mana for me to use.

And what's the mana for? Deckard's glowing hand gives him the power to heal himself! Hold the button to absorb the 'Animus Energy' of defeated creatures, and then hold it again to heal yourself. It's all on the same button. Even the telekinetic blast is a double tap. I want to moan at the developers for putting it all on the same key, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until it actually screws me over.

Almost out of bullets now. I need to be more careful with the next baddie and use the axe instead. Not as easy as it sounds: it's a separate weapon, Doom-style, so it's hard to switch to.

Heh, I needn't have worried. I had the perfect fortune to trigger a mythical cataclysm during what had to be a worldwide concealed carry convention centred on the New York subway. Every carriage I clamber into has its own dead guy with a pistol case full of bullets for me to yoink. Good old USA. If this was a British train, it would have been full of tea instead. And cancelled.

Meanwhile, the heroic cops are making a stand against the drakes on their side of the platform. It all ends in flames and tears. I'd have helped you, but you're a cutscene and I can't interact with you. I'm so sorry.

Hey, who's that talking? Oh, it's the getaway driver lass! I'd forgotten all about her. She's calling me up on my super-thief earpiece (Deckard's a professional and went for the other-side-of-the-city-and-underground range model) and giving me some practical advice:

"Find weapons and keep moving! We're going to need each other to get out of New York alive!"

I like the sound of that a lot. It's a linear path from here, so onward! If you get lost on this linear path, Legendary has an objective marker in case your attention span truly is that short.

Hey, didn't I do this room already? It looks a lot like the last one, but then again I am inside the largest underground public transportation system in the world so it's going to look a little samey.

Hell, this is just nice all over. Mythical monsters, magic healing powers, fancy clothes, a callous disregard for the safety of other survivors and a single objective: get the hell out of there, alive. Thank you, Legendary. This is exactly what I needed right now to cheer me up. A toast, to pistols.

It seems like there's infinite firedrakes here. The objective isn't to clear out the room and claim the territory back. It's to figure out which door is the one that leads you to safety and get the hell out of there!

Deckard is a nippy son of a bitch and I've gotta use every last bit of his speed to survive these attacks. He can duck, dive and dart about like nobody's business. Unfortunately, the slightest bit of height renders him helpless. The way out of this room is that vent on the right, but unless you find the right little set of steps that lead to it, you'll be trapped here forever. The objective marker is your friend.

Oh hey, I just remembered something else kinda cool:

Deckard's got a monster encyclopedia in his PDA!

It's got information about all the creatures, people, places and weapons you encounter, and it's a nice thing to have. It doesn't bleep in your ear every time you meet a creature or accomplish an objective so it's easy to forget about it.

According to Deckard's notes, these guys are like dragons except they are real which makes them not dragons. They breathe fire, live in caves and eat people. So, that makes them actual dragon dragons then? They inspired dragons, but they're not dragons, he says.

I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing the actual winged dragon dragons too, but these things clearly are real komodo dragons with the bonus attributes of the mythical dragon. That makes them at least 150% dragon in total.

More survivors! Looks like this particular gentleman's got himself onto a bit of a sticky wicket.

Who cares if Half-Life has done it? We'll do it, too!

Don't ask how these people get themselves into these situations.

I'm starting to realise that I might not be taking the train out of here any time soon.

The next encounter against the firedrakes has out of control subway cars shooting along the tracks while you fight. There's too many of them here to even think about standing still. You'll be killed in seconds if you try to hide, so instead I challenge them to a game of chicken on the train tracks. It might not be safe for the poor folks on the subway, but this is a matter of personal survival so I'm willing to take risks. Exciting risks that end in explosions of sparks and fire.

To clear the way, I have to turn a valve and activate the sprinklers. Oooh...

Well, that seems to be the subway done and dusted. That was nifty. In the next room there's a loading lift. Am I going up... or down?

Arghh! Werewolf!

Wait, werewolf? During the day? Surely not!

This is no ordinary werewolf. This is a 'Limos werewolf'.

Weak and ravenous from hunger, these wolf-like creatures suffer from a highly-accelerated metabolism that forces them to hunt for food day and night. The hunger-crazed Limos Werewolf is fairly easy to take down one-on-one, but they can be overwhelming in greater numbers.

It's not really a werewolf if it's not a transformed person. I thought Deck was being picky about the firedrakes not being dragons because they're not dragony enough, but this guy is nowhere werewolfy enough. He's just weird! Hairless werewolves? Refuge of the defeatist 'we can't model this', 'we can't figure out how to render this' or 'special effects for our movie are expensive' school of thought if ya ask me. D minus.

Oh hey, we've returned to the surface. Man, I think we've been underground for quite enough, don't you agree? I can't even remember why we went down there in the first place.

Ohhh yeah.

Those guys.

I'm not sure exactly how many gryphons a situation needs to become a snafu, but I think we're getting close.

And that guy.

There's a load of nice touches here that you won't notice if you're too blinded by hate by reading lesser reviews, or simply don't want to see them.

For example, there's all kinds of audio and visual effects firing off all around. Look to the rooftops and you'll see survivors running up the fire escapes trying to find shelter from the gryphons. Their animation is jerky as hell and it doesn't look right at all, but who cares?

I'm hearing automatic fire to my right...

"We need backup, we're getting slaughtered out here!"

Who could that be? Survivors? The army? Whoever they are, they sound like they need the assistance of a well-dressed man with a blammy gun and a glowy hand.

And if you want to be a big downer, yes there's only one way forward through all the wreckage, and yes it's all very suspiciously convenient, and yes it all crumbles behind you blocking your path, and yes there's nothing to be found outside the route even if you could go there. It's a destroyed city, dingus. What could there possibly be? We're moving up, on and out.

If you were to somehow rewrite Legendary so that it only showed you platforms, objects, monsters and parts of the environment that you could interact with, you'd find out that you were in fact stuck in a very shallow trench with very little to do. Modern games do it all the time, it's not a shock. The weird thing about Legendary is that it's ridiculously obvious, but the scenario is too cool for me to care.

This? YOU SEE THIS?

This is exactly what I signed on for. Cops shooting gryphons with automatic weapons, protecting the survivors. This is soooo cooool!

I want to help them! I want to shoot the gryphons, but... I know I can't. I can't move from this room, and I can't take out the gryphons while they're not paying attention to me because it's a cutscene and none of this exists. In fact, because of the way I'm looking through a rectangular, it's like a little clockwork diorama playing out beneath me.

Yahh!

"Listen, pal, making games is super expensive and super difficult. You got any idea how long it took to model me? How about you lighten up and just enjoy the show. Think of these scenes as a lead-in to your part. Wait for your cue and then go in guns blazing. Alright? Alright. Now let me eat you."

That is one frowny bird.

Frowny face leaps off the building and knocks over the filing cabinet that was blocking the exit. The stairs lead down to street level...

And right into the encounter with the cops! Hell yeah!

After, we're going to have some epic character drama between the exhausted cops trying to hold the fragments of their city together until help arrives, and the heartless thief who has the evidence of his guilt seared into his very hands. Right...? Did I mention I was big on Parasite Eve, too?

But first we've gotta kill some firedrakes. I hope you don't mind if I help myself to the submachinegun from the back of your squad car!

Wheee! This is fun. I bet if I shot that fire hydrant over there, it would spew water all over the place and damage the firedrakes, because they're fiery monsters and...! Oh. The game just told me in capital letters that that is exactly what I have to do at this point. Thanks. I was almost being proactive. Won't make that mistake again.

Looks like the government has gotten wind of my monster-unleashing antics and has sent evil fascist Anti X-Com goons in a flying VTOL thing to sort me out. They're all kitted out with fancy supervillain uniforms and everything. Maybe they think that if they stuff my severed hand back into Pandora's Box, it'll all poof away Jumanji-style. If they want my magic glowy hand, then they can come and pry it from my cold dead... other hand!

I honestly thought these cops were scripted to die from fighting the firedrakes. The first few times I fought this scene, the cops all got torched to death and I had to do the next scene alone.

But... if you're fast enough, and enough of a game master:

You can save the cops and have them fight alongside you against the goons!

Fighting against human enemies is a lot different to the firedrakes. The firedrakes roll up to you, jump up to the ledges where you're hiding, sneak behind you, explode at close range and do all kinds of sneaky stuff. The mercs have three combat moves: get to cover, stay there, and shoot Deckard in the face. They've played Call of Duty, and apparently so have Spark.

Ouch. It turns out that one man, however glowy his hand is, is not really an even match for half a dozen goons in body armour with automatic weapons. It's nowhere near a fair fight even when it all functions correctly; nothing except for the player's skill can overcome the asymmetry of it. You know, fun game kind of stuff. Hell, even aim assist is optional!

In a few seconds I have the entire situation contained and feel mighty, mighty smug. But the goons didn't drop mana...! Ahh, because they're not magical critters of course. You've got to kill the goons to get the guns, and you've got to kill the mons to get the mana.

And if I can pit them against each other by shooting the obvious flashing targets that trigger canned environmental effects that function correctly only 50% of the time cleverly manipulating the vast non-linear environment with my clever brain-think and gun-shoot, I can kill the surviving team without using up my previous ammo and mana! Excellent!

I haven't found a single health kit through the game so far (one of the first things you'd swipe in a mega-emergency perhaps), so knowing how and when to kill monsters and slurp magic is very important.

And then more firedrakes come... I haven't fought against any other kind of enemy so far, the gryphons and the Limos werewolf were all cutscenes.

"Hey buddy! Get in here, fast!"

A way out! I'll take it!

The sprinkler system inside that building has gone into overdrive with water streaming down all the walls. A perfect place to hide from firedrakes!

And what happened to my other favourite surviving cop buddy? The one guy who cheated his destined cutscene death, still hunched behind his car and trying to clear his beloved streets of infinite firedrakes?

No small amount of heroism goes unpunished in a true disaster situation.

He might be able to break free if he can shoot the drake in the throat! C'mon! You can do it, man! Though I'm not sure how wise that is...

Buuurrrp!

Yeah, I know I could have helped him. It's a game, shuddup. Firedrakes explode when they die anyway (I should know I've been killed by them often enough) so it was a lost cause the moment the animation started. I doubt anybody has had that cop survive to this point before. Maybe I'm the only person who's ever seen this animation!

"Come on, this way!"

Yeah, let's move on.

That one cop who opened the door for me turned out to be a real nice guy. Completely unaffected by the massacre that took place in front of him, he's calm, collected and opening all the doors for us so we can escape together.

"I kinda just wanna go home, you know? If it's still there."

Oh man...

Why did you have to say that? Why...?

This werewolf is scripted, and there's nothing I can do about it. The cop is dead.

And then the werewolf suddenly becomes unscripted, turns 180 degrees and claws my face off. Son of a bitch!

HEY! We were outside for a grand total of four minutes, if that. Now we're back inside again! Men alive, make up your minds.

Fighting werewolves is a lot different to fighting firedrakes. They like to move up and down along the walls rather than stay on the ground and if there's an object between you and them, they love to hurl it at you. And because Deck isn't packing any silver bullets in that nifty automatic pistol of his, you have to stun the buggers with a volley of bullets and switch to the fire-axe to definitively decapitate them. It's a hassle, but a fun one. For now.

And of course there's always a bit of time left after you've finished making the game to throw in a physics puzzle where you have to blow up some heavy objects on one platform to make it rise up. It wouldn't be a 2008 first person shooter without one. 'Physics puzzles' were the 'hacking minigame' of 2008. Ask your... big brother, I guess.

Eagh! Too close, too close! This axe plan is not working out well at all. I'm fumbling with the keyboard trying to switch to it while holding a few other buttons to dodge to the side. Maybe this is their revenge for my calling them not real werewolves...

Slurping is seriously dangerous inside the warehouse. You need to stay close to floating energy to take it, but there's no safe place to wait. Maybe you're supposed to stun the werewolves with the magical force blast, but mana is so valuable that you can't waste it on force blasts. At least not intentionally.

By this point I'm finding boxes of ammo stashed all over the place. Any pretence of being 'that' kind of survival game is straight out the window. This is a shooter. And now that I come to think of it, it's reminding me mostly of Doom except a lot faster and smaller. As I recall, you fight groups of enemies in regular Doom levels a lot, but never vast armies. You don't lose because you're overwhelmed, but because you're too reckless and got yourself trapped with no place to escape to when the fireballs come flying at you. Unless you're playing Doom 2 in which case you'll probably die of boredom from not being able to find the exit. Come to think of it, Doom 2's about monsters on Earth too. Except back in 1994, Earth's mightiest cities were nothing more than a bunch of soiled cardboard boxes piled up on a landfill.

This is the part where there's a guy trapped on the other side of a locked door and I have to find a way to collect the keycard that unlocks the security room that contains the switch that opens the door and saves the day. A 'Legendary' quest to be sure. It's not that much of a bother, and in fact I'm quite enjoying it. Deck's got a crappy leap, but one hell of a forward lope. You just need to account for it. It's all fun and games until the respawning werewolves spring up from ground level to my elevated platform and knock me right back down to the ground repeatedly.

I've had enough. I'm hopping mad and I'm gonna fill your pointy face full of bullets until it EXPLODES.

And explode it does! My reward is a magical fireworks display as the goofy fake werewolf's head comes clean off, leaving a flailing grey stickman body bouncing off the walls of the security room.

Ahh, the sky. I remember the sky. I had such lofty hopes. I was going to fight gryphons. I was going to meet interesting people, hear their desperate pleas for mercy, and accidentally kill them with magic powers. But then I entered the warehouse and submitted myself to the sentence of fighting these lousy hairless werewolves for all eternity. The music makes it bearable and it's not even that special. Each encounter has its own twangy guitar theme that sets the mood. It would have been awful without it.

Warehouse? Werewolves? Oh man, that had to be intentional...

And we're out! Fresh air! Right into a six-foot square of pavement surrounded by wreckage and rubble, leading nowhere but back down into the subway.

At least I got to see an advert for Pimp Hand Strong. Makes it all worthwhile.

Legendary has very discrete, defined scenes. You'll fight one specific type of monster for a while, then you'll step into the next room and it'll feel like a completely different world. Combat rarely lasts more than a minute, with lengthy scenes where you have to 'flick the switch' and 'open the door' with only the guitar twangs for company. Even though the world is crammed full of keypads, hacking minigames are mercifully absent. You hold a button and Deckard forces them open with his mind.

This is the first survivor I've seen for some time. Poor woman managed to gather up her guts and stagger into the station, living just long enough for them all to topple out again in front of Deckard. It's been a real fun day.

I thought I'd be finding more crazy people, similar to how the Dead Rising games work. There's certainly no rooms full of weeping survivors begging for help in Legendary. Most of the people you find are either already dead or die within moments of seeing you.

Which means... ♫ no escort missions! ♫

Firedrakes in the subway again. I don't know what to say; this really does look identical to the other subway level, doesn't it? Legendary doesn't do itself a lot of favours when it does stuff like this. Even if it's plausible that two parts of the same subway network look alike, it doesn't make it interesting. It's lucky that fighting firedrakes is fun enough to make being stuck down here passable.

This time it's different! It's not me and the drakes any more. It is time for the foretold three way encounter between myself, the evil mercs and the monsters! It's as chaotic as it sounds. The best option is to hide if you can and take out the rest of the surviving team when the gunfire has stopped.

The goons are barely visible on the screen in these shots. The ironsights have a ridiculously powerful zoom for a weapon without a scope, and firing them while aiming in the dark gets you nothing but a screenful of blinding muzzle flash. You don't need it anyway: Deckard's better trained than any given FPS soldier. Every shot's a hit.

The game has some odd ideas about where I can and cannot go. The leap from track level to platform level here is hopelessly impassable. Down here, there's only one route comprised of shallow ramps and conveniently toppled wooden boards that leads you from place to place. It took me a while to find it even using the objective marker. Very strange considering it's an Unreal engine game.

Hey! It's a mystery woman!

She calmly pulls out her hand-cannon and explodes a werewolf to pieces right in front of my eyes. Say hello to Vivian, my getaway driver! (She's also the one who narrated the intro slideshow if you were bored enough to watch it.)

Her plan is to meet up at an abandoned mercenary command post and use it to call for help. I'm surprised she bothered to come down here and fight her way deep into monster territory just to meet up with me. She was sat in her car, ready to flee the city a moment's notice and she decided to come and rescue a complete stranger who she has absolutely no reason to trust, given that he's a master criminal.

Here's a subtle thing: she kills the werewolf by exploding its head with a shot from her hand-cannon. This is the game telling you that a werewolf can be decapitated with gunfire instead of the fire-axe if you're fast enough with the headshots. A funny time for the game to start trusting the player to work things out, but I appreciate it. It would have been nice if it were as subtle with the environmental kills (well, the one environmental kill against the one creature type I've encountered so far).

The woman boots up the computer and sends out a signal for help, but it's intercepted by the sinister guy who hired us, who was sitting at his desk the entire time apparently expecting us to do exactly that. (Shh, whatever, roll with it.)

"My dear, if I didn't let you in on the details of my operation when I hired Mr. Deckard, what makes you think I'm going to do so now?"

I like the slightly over-the-top voice acting you get between these two. He's a smugdick and she's yelling every word with a voice like a British nanny. Unleashing the monsters was all part of his plan, it turns out. He's not going to tell us why, even when we're stuck in the middle of it all and almost certainly going to die. There are few good reasons I can think of for wanting to trigger this. It's probably not the Die Hard With A Vengeance gambit; if you've got your own private army complete with high-tech weapons and vehicles, what are you going to do with money? And also the collapse of humanity might make it hard to spend too. A mystery.

"Goodbye, Mr. Deckard. I'm sure you're professional enough to understand... it's just business."

Music roars. Goons ambush!

Finally something to kill people to! I'm in a quite large area full of pillars and train cars and there's goons rushing in from both sides and above. I'm pumped! Let's see how they like some close-combat Deckard fighting style!

Splat. It's fun to run up to the goons who are helplessly caught up in their entrance animation and murderise them while they're unable to react to you, but you've gotta be quick. Deckard's sprint meter doesn't last two seconds, especially if you use his quick dives so you'll spend a lot of the fight hiding and out of breath. Then they stomp towards your cover, hitting you around corners with magic bullets and then you cry.

Because there's no regenerating health, getting hit is devastating. In this encounter there are some Animus orbs scattered about for you to find, but attracting mana is way too slow to try when you're under fire. You've got to hammer the magic button after absorbing it to get Deckard to switch to healing. You can do both while running but it isn't easy.

Dead.

Oh hell. You have to sit through the entire cutscene talking to the mastermind every time you mess up the ambush. That's just stupid. Of course you're probably going to mess it up, it's an ambush. Argh...

"My signal got through! Those soldiers are on our side!"

What guys? What's going on? More soldiers? The army? Navy? Marines? Huuuuuuuh?

Aw, crivens! The faces, the faces!

Must have gone to school with Alex D. from Invisible War...

These 'good guys' are part of a secret society that's secretly been at war for centuries with another secret society over possession of Pandora's Box. The golem has absorbed Pandora's Box from the rubble of the museum, so the good mercs are forming a plan to dissolve the golem and recover it. Deckard has to team up with them as part of their squad, and single-handedly locate and activate three EMP devices and... oh God my brain is melting.

This was all laid out in detail in the intro slideshow but I spared you it because I desperately wanted it to not be true. It's all crazy and weird and it makes my head hurt thinking about it.

Why are they sending out the one guy whose death may mean the fall of humanity as we know it? Maybe they're keeping an eye on him? Maybe they're that short on manpower? Maybe it's just friggin' Legendary.

And isn't that Colonel Telford from Stargate Universe (external link)?

Phew, there it is. It's time for the awesome Times Square level! There's no way they can mess this up. But if we're heading to the subway or the sewers or something ONE MORE TIME, I swear that the Golem is going to be the least of these soldiers' problems.

Here's the plan, gents: I want you guys to stick to cover like superglue and fail to give me any sort of covering fire while I run in there alone and get killed by firedrakes. Commendations to those who yell stuff like "Deckard, get back here!" while they shoot through me to hit the monsters.

My mission, whether I choose to accept it or not, is to recover some EMP gizmos that fell out of the choppers when they decided to fly their precision vehicles too close to the giant magic magnetic beast. If we get them back, we can anti-neutralise the Golem's magnetic field and save the universe. Let's go...

PSYCHE! The golem stomps around a bit and the floor collapses, dropping Deck and the Good Mercs into - you guessed it - the sewers, along with my hopes, dreams and will to live.

Would it have killed you to let me stay overground for two whole minutes?

Maybe I've been spoiled by Crysis 2 but it is possible to have fun city combat that alternates between creatures and guys that takes place in broad daylight in multiple different locations without spending all your time underground.

I'm getting the impression that giving the player a little bit of hope and then cruelly taking it away is Legendary's style. It happens over and over again through the game to the characters and I enjoy it a lot as I'm a big, big, big fan of The Outer Limits. But suddenly this specific case seems very personal to me. "I'm mad at you, Legendary! I'm furious.", I yell at the screen, and the game just sits there stroking its chin, nodding its head saying "Good... good.". I don't mind anticipation in games: if you tell me that the main character's party is going to a far off place, then I expect that we'll have some substantial adventures alone the way. But if you show me a golem over and over and over, describe to me the plan in detail, and then we don't do it... It got an emotion out of me. That's worth something.

The sewer level is a horror level where the Good Mercs are picked off one by one by evil tiny harpy pixies. They flap around you in circles, turning invisible at will, possessing objects and giggling at you. It's precisely not what I want to be doing after being trapped in a subway. And yet, they make it bearable by hinting at a way to force the fairies into becoming tangible and giving you a big chunky loud 'get the hell outta my sight' shotgun to shut 'em all down with.

I can't believe I got upset about being gypped out of a feeble, scripted 'giant monster use the infinite rockets' boss battle.

I'm still upset about the loony plot because I was so attached to the idea of survival in a city with monsters. If this ends with Deck joining the mercs, then it seems like there will be no more survival, just advancing and shooting. Safety isn't something you should be able to get that easily in this situation I think. After we resolve this freaking sewer and finally get round to popping the Golem, there's only one thing that would cheer me up. And that would be if their escape chopper were to be attacked by angry, angry gryphons as punishment to the mercs for their hubris in trying to enforce order upon the chaos.

That very thing happens. Hallelujah.

Legendary is difficult to describe. Every time I think about it, all I can recall are the worst bits. Yet, whenever I play it, all I can think of is how much damned fun I'm having fighting monsters in a city with loud, working guns. I don't think you can get a sense of the timing of Legendary's scenes from these pictures. Looking back it sure seems like it's repeating itself, but when you play it for real, each scene passes quickly so that it doesn't outstay its welcome at all. It's very well done, and whoever planned the levels doesn't get enough credit.

It's a seeping kind of terrible: rushed and weird. You could say the same thing about other games like Namco's kill.switch, a strange, empty, almost incomprehensible third person shooter that incidentally single-handedly created the cover shooter. The fact is that I like terrible. And Legendary is a triple-A kind of terrible, in every sense of the word. I'll take 'terrible' over 'boring', over 'unfair', over 'defend this room against three waves' and definitely over 'the guns don't do anything'.

In my Half-Life post, I said that "If somebody added Half-Life, Requiem and System Shock 2 together, you'd have a really, really good game." Legendary is two out of the three, and I think we can live without System Shock 2's interface.

It goes overground, underground, overground; always changing, but always seeming somehow like you're running in circles through the same few rooms again and again. There's only about half a dozen enemy types in the game, and they don't get any more fearsome as you progress. You'll be plunged into one dungeon after another, cursing fate as I did, but then escaping before you know what's happening. Legendary is a strange thing.

We live in a horrible twisted world where complete shit like Halo can get game after game, re-released and updated every God-damned day and nobody's heard of Legendary. If you're sick of military FPSes and you don't pick up a game about a dude in a snappy suit shooting monsters in the midst of the end of the world... well, I don't know what to tell you.

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