by: Dameon White

January 01, 2009

From the makers of Turning Point and Call of Duty: Finest Hour, comes Legendary from Spark – an end of the world story who’s setting showed great potential, but failed miserably due to its poor execution. The story isn’t so legendary either.

In Legendary you play as Charles Deckard, a thief for hire who gets in way over his head when he takes a job from a not-so-mysterious man named LeFey and his almost somewhat attractive associate called Vivian to steal a box from a New York museum. Unfortunately for you and the rest of the world that box just so happens to be Pandora’s Box and using your legendary (see what I did there?) skills as a master of the arts of thievery, you somehow accidentally open the damn thing and unleash swarms of mythological creatures bent on destroying the world. As a reminder of what you’ve done your hand is forever branded with a sigil. That sigil also holds power that’s attached to Pandora’s Box and the rest of the monsters that you’ve just unleashed into the world courtesy of your little screw-up.

Legendary is a bit a of letdown in that it could have been a much better title and even with its incredibly predictable story that covers secret societies all searching for Pandora’s Box over generations, the atmosphere and mythological creatures from legends – hence the name – showed great promise, but were brought down as a result of poor execution and in somewhat brain insulting tasks.

After you’ve opened the box, which happens right at the start of the game, your goal thereafter are both to save the world from destruction from werewolves, evil griffins and other creatures and find out what exactly is going on with the help of Vivian, as you’ve both been quickly betrayed and left to fend for yourself in the ruins of New York. Was opening that box an accident afterall or were you sent there with the sole purpose of bringing destruction upon us all? It’s easy enough to figure out and you’ll be guessing in the 99.99 percentile range what’s going to happen next as you progress through the rather short campaign that will lead you from New York to London and then back to New York to finally seal the box. This leads me to wonder why you couldn’t just seal the box when you were in New York in the first place.

Aside from its lackluster story, what really hurts this game is how limited the game is in both scope and variety. While the monsters are pretty cool and feature many of the famous creatures you’ve read about, the game’s environments are incredibly small, linear and lack any really differentiators from one locale to the next. For starters, London and New York look pretty different from each other, no? Well, not so much in Legendary, as much of the game you’re merely traversing from one hallway or one building to the next, fighting monsters that get in your way opening doors. Most of these buildings all look pretty much the same and all feature doors that need to be opened or switches that need to be pulled or something of that nature. Spark has even managed to take the fun out of falling debris and crumbling buildings, as there’s no sense of randomness to this game whatsoever. As things crumble around you, they literally cascade into a perfect path for, as if the game is saying ‘follow me’, except there’s no other way to go anyway. Ledges will perfectly align and if the ground crumbles beneath you there’s no need to worry, because you can literally just watch it continue to crumble until it forms a perfectly arched pathway out or until a car falls slowly into the whole that lines up at the perfect angle to walk over it. It’s pretty uninspiring. Moreover, nothing crumbling around you or busting through walls seems to be able to hurt you, so when you see that giant griffin break through the wall, just keep going because it’s just for show. It feels like a digital version of a ride you’d expect to be on at Disneyland.