Legendary Review

Game:  Legendary
Year:  2008
Company:  dev. Spark Unlimited, pub. Gamecock Media Group et al
Engine:  Unreal Engine 3
Type:  First-Person Shooter
What I Paid:  $0.  Came free with my DVD drive


Plot

In Legendary, you are a thief that tries to steal Pandora's box and inadvertently opens it, spilling all sorts of monsters out in to the world.  The bad guys want to control the creatures and use them to rule the world.  The good guys want to destroy the box.  So while you're getting shot at by the bad guys, you're also dealing with werewolves, fire drakes, minotaurs and so on.  The ending is cool.


General Comments

Spark Unlimited was founded by people that had worked on the Medal of Honor franchise.  They have only developed three games, the most well known a Call of Duty title.

Unfortunately, lack of attention to detail ruin the game.  There are NPCs that can be walked through.  If you swing your axe at them, it sounds just like when you hit concrete.  There are a couple of simple puzzles, but they're so non-intuitive they're just frustrating.


What is Unique?

The combination of modern times with mythological monsters is cool, and the monsters look great.  The boss fights are epic.  While fighting normal enemies and trying to activate scattered machinery, a golem is punching holes through buildings and trying to step on you.  A kraken knocks down Big Ben before you get to pummel it with rockets.


Combat

You get an axe, and two guns, similar to FEAR and other titles.  This game uses check-point saving, so no quick saves.  Though there are probably a dozen or so different kinds of enemies, there seem to be more werewolves than anything else.  Chopping their heads off actually gets to be tedious.  There are about half a dozen weapons, and they do not adhere to the "equal, but differently useful" philosophy.  Lack of ammo limits use of the most powerful weapons.

Legendary has a simple magic system.  You kill monsters, you get energy.  This can be used to push enemies (not very useful) and to heal yourself. There are no med kits.  Killing humans does not give you energy.


Final Thoughts

Some copies of this (such as mine) have a fatal coding error that makes it impossible to reach the last area and beat the game.  There is no patch for this, and starting from an earlier save or starting over entirely is ineffective.  This and other things that should have been addressed by play testers make the cool story and nice graphics crash and burn.  I would not recommend paying money for this game.

Spark Unlimited is currently working on their fourth game.  There are currently no details.  Hopefully, they will learn from their mistakes.