Legendary

Legendary is a first-person shooter video game developed by Spark Unlimited and published by Gamecock Media Group in the United States and Atari for the Europe regions for the mh:awesomegames:Xbox 360, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 3, and mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows.

Plot
The Pandora's Box was a device containing multitudes of power. In the early 21st century, the artifact was found in ruins at the bottom of the ocean by archaeologists. However, they were unable to pinpoint its origins, and so they placed the artifact in an art museum in New York City to study it. Ormond LeFey, a wealthy millionaire who knows of the artifact's true nature, hires a professional thief named Charles Deckard, tasking him with opening the box and stealing it's contents (with a large payment as his reward).

Deckard sneaks into the museum, bypassing security and locating the box. He manages to open the box, but upon doing, mythological beasts are unleashed into the world and are hellbent to destroying mankind. Soon after, he, as well as LeFey's assistant Vivian Kane are betrayed by LeFey, sending in his army, the Black Order, to kill them. Deckard, along with Vivian and the Black Order's rivals, the Council of 98, set out to stop LeFey and seal the creatures back into the box.

Why It Ain't Legendary

 * 1) Despite the game's potentially interesting premise, the story is poorly developed.
 * 2) The game has unskippable cutscenes.
 * 3) Limited scope; the only locations you can visit are New York City, some random Harry Potter castle, and London.
 * 4) Samey level design and environments: you're almost always either in a sewer, a subway, or a warehouse.
 * 5) All of the supposedly-thrilling events are so heavily scripted that it's obvious the player is never in any actual danger: it's like the player is walking through some insanely large prank and hasn't the heart to tell anyone they figured out it wasn't real the instant it started.
 * 6) Dull and unimaginative weapon selection, with both the starting weapons so weak as to be practically useless. There are only eleven weapons in the game: a fire axe mostly used for beheading werewolves, two pistols, one of them trash, a terrible SMG, a semi-functional rifle, an overpowered machine gun, an okay shotgun, a flamethrower you can't aim properly, a rocket launcher you barely get to use, and two grenades, a molotov cocktail that can barely burn a single target, and a standard frag.
 * 7) Levels also have cliches such as the rocket launcher boss fight.
 * 8) Very abysmal checkpoint system.
 * 9) The PDA is written in a tone so smug it's hard to read it and not come away actively loathing Deckard.
 * 10) The game is padded out in many ways; to unlock closed doors, you find a security keypad and hold down a button to connect two wires behind it. There is no need to find any code, keycard, or perform a minigame: all it is doing is hiding a loading screen.
 * 11) Unimaginative puzzles that usually just involve turning valves or killing waves of enemies to build up enough energy to activate something. A couple feature more advanced ideas like "shoot the grate you have no reason to think you can break," "shoot the trashcans which for no adequately defined reason are full of water" or the brilliant "turn the handles and throw grenades into the vents because the handle is for a gas pipe and you're supposed to just guess that."
 * 12) The game cannot stick to the premise of legends being true and instead goes the route of ignoring the myths and saying these are the real things the legends are about. The legendary creatures also do not come from any specific mythology and are not related to the places they appear: there are only ten creatures (and that's generous since it includes what's basically a trap, two different types of werewolves and a "boss" that's basically just moving scenery), and most are just melee attackers.
 * 13) The game alternates between hand-holding tutorials and completely unexplained sections, making it confusing to play.
 * 14) Awful jumping mechanics; Deckard can only hop a few inches off the ground, yet if he jumps while sprinting, he leaps as if he's a long jump competitor.
 * 15) Shooting mechanics are ripped right out of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (though aiming and turning in this game has been a improvement).
 * 16) The game's sole spark of originality, the Signet, integrates a series of functions that don't really make much sense being connected, and in levels is rarely more than a glorified use key.
 * 17) The mechanic is also badly implemented since absorbing Animus requires holding down a button but using Animus to heal requires holding down the same button, resulting in many fatal cases of doing one instead of the other.
 * 18) The single mode multiplayer mode available makes better use of the animus, but the four available maps are uninteresting and matches are often over before they begin.
 * 19) Despite running on Unreal Engine 3, the graphics and visual effects look very poor, with low res textures, a large amount of environmental clipping and how when shooting a window, the sound of glass breaking is heard but no glass actually breaks.
 * 20) Forgettable rock soundtrack.
 * 21) Mediocre voice-acting.
 * 22) The PC version has a game-breaking bug that causes Deckard to fall through the elevator leading to the final boss. When Gamecock Media Group was contacted by players about the glitch, they told them to go buy another computer because the bug wouldn't be fixed. The actual way is to limit your framerate to 30 FPS.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) As mentioned above, the premise is potentially interesting.
 * 2) The enemy designs, such as the Griffins and the Kraken, look interesting.
 * 3) Some decent set pieces, such as a gargantuan Titan wreaking havoc on the streets of New York City.

Reception
Legendary received mixed to negative reviews from critics, with Metacritic scores of 50/100 for both Windows and PlayStation 3 versions, and 47/100 for the Xbox 360 version.

Videos
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