The characters themselves are basically a mix of three different types. First, you have your heavy hitters like Wolverine and Juggernaut who, to put it mildly, like to hurt people with their (almost) bare hands. They are capable of holding their own in close combat with large numbers of foes but don't have a whole lot of mutant energy (the game's equivalent of magic). Next you've got characters like Storm and Jean Grey who tend to get served when surrounded by brawling enemies but who can rain some real destruction on foes from afar. What can I say, there is nothing quite like big white eyes that can kill from a distance. Finally there are your middleweights like Nightcrawler and Gambit who are decent at fisticuffs but who can also serve up some ranged pain. Speaking of pain, when you encounter enemies you are capable of assailing them with a variety of simple combo moves utilizing light or heavy attacks. You can also use various special skills unique to each character which you can assign to different buttons in the menu. When two characters nail an enemy with a special skill at the same time it triggers a combo that does extra damage (it must sure feel nice to get struck by lightning just as you are trying to adjust to those ten inch adamantium claws that have been placed in your stomach!) and produces extra experience when the foe is defeated. These skills are learned by leveling up and can be upgraded similarly to the skill trees in Diablo or the Baldur's Gate games. Your characters can also learn passive abilities that give them various stat boosts or increase the strength of other abilities. All in all, combat feels fun and satisfying but does get a little repetitive from time to time.

   If your characters don't seem capable of tackling the current villains, you can always take them into a few rounds of Danger Room simulated combat to get them up to snuff and possibly win some cool items. This makes for a nice occasional distraction from the main gameplay. Unfortunately, the retro-missions are gone this time around, which is a shame 'cause it was pretty fun to be able to play through some of the older X-Men stories.

Lookin' good!

   Graphically the game has been solidly upgraded. When the camera zooms in your characters no longer look like they were sculpted out of Play-Doh by developmentally disabled children, and the handful of short cut-scenes are positively gorgeous, or as gorgeous as scenes of meaty, hairy men yelling and wailing on each other can be. Character movements are smooth and fluid and the camera can be easily adjusted to stay with the action. There is also (finally!) a diversity of enemies to go along with the upgraded environments, improving upon the last game's handful of soldiers and faceless Brotherhood. This time around, the menu has been expanded with winged mutants, evil priests, giant bugs (try them in chocolate!), the Brood, and crazed robots. Bon appetit.

   Music-wise the soundtrack is muted, subtle and largely forgettable. The sound effects, on the other hand, are crisp and really add impact to each punch, slash, and crashing body. The voice acting is professional and the cast are largely veterans of various cartoons and other games. Of course, Patrick Stewart returns as the voice of Professor X. Huzzah!

Any fun for any fan?

   I'll be straight with you; if you aren't a fan of comic books, or, more specifically, the minor universe surrounding Marvel's X-Men, I have a hard time picturing you getting into this game. Unlike the first X-Men Legends, in which the player was slowly introduced to all things X-Men along with X-(Wo)Man-in-training Magma, Rise of Apocalypse essentially assumes the player is intimately familiar with the vast majority of X-Men canon and drops more names than a huge poser at a Hollywood shindig. If you don't know your Sunfire from your Sauron you're going to become seriously lost amidst the sea of supporting characters, their complicated back-stories, and their network of relationships, all of which receive little or no in-game discussion. Hell, even being familiar with most of the characters, there were moments where I got lost myself. Pretty much everything that isn't dealt with at the very beginning of the game doesn't get dealt with period, including playable characters. There are three hidden characters in Rise of Apocalypse, all of which can't be recruited until the very end of the game, every other playable character is available right from the get-go. While this is handy for carefully customizing your team, it destroys the excitement of never knowing what new characters you are going to find and how they fit into the big picture. So unless you absolutely LOVE dungeon crawling, if you aren't into the X-Men, this game isn't going to change that.

Pure X-citement for comic fans! (Okay, I promise I'll stop.)

   Conversely, if you totally dig the X-Men, this game is going to rock your world even harder than those all-night Heroclix sessions at The Dragon's Den gaming store. The first Legends tried to keep things simple in much the same way as the recent X-Men movies, utilizing a fairly stripped-down cast of heroes and villains and weaving an intriguing narrative around them. Legends II, however, decided to throw all things even remotely X-Men into a big jug and shake firmly. Pretty much any character who worked with or battled against the X-Men at one point or another makes an appearance, including the Hellfire Club, Deadpool, Blink, and, bizarrely enough, Iron Man. And let me tell you, you Alpha Flight fans are totally going to flip out (that's right, both of you)! Sure, most of your interactions with these characters only vaguely tie in with the main story, and that in itself never seems to evolve much beyond the point of, "Rescue friends. Stop Apocalypse. Look good." but c'mon! On the other hand, it is comic books, so what do we expect? The X-Men series has always been about superhero zaniness with a healthy dollop of angsty melodrama, and that is exactly what you get here. Sure, smacking around the endless legions of Apocalypse might get repetitive from time to time, but whenever you want to spice things up you can always run around as Juggernaut and chuck dumpsters at people. Then it's all good. Plus, as an added bonus for longtime fans of the comics, you can even switch most of the character's updated costumes to their older versions. Yellow Wolverine? Oh hell yeah.

Beam me up, Cyclops!

   In the end, if you think comics are for dorks and that a Garokk is something you get on your wang when you don't use adequate protection, well, I suppose you can go back to playing football and making out with girls, or whatever else it is you and your kind do when not administering wedgies or swirlies to people like me. If, though, you really liked the first X-Men Legends and you've always wondered what a battle with Gambit, Sunfire, the Scarlet Witch, and Bishop versus the Living Monolith would look like, this game is everything you could ever dream of in a sequel. And, on a side note, perhaps it's time you went outside and got a little sun.

       ... Mike Zeller