Legendary: The Box Demo

The FPS genre is very malleable, in the sense that you can include basically any other elements you wish and get away with it, as long as you can make the gameplay fun and tell a good story while you're at it as well. On the other hand, it is also possible to break it entirely by not respecting a few simple rules and even by forcing too many different ideas into the same pot.

Legendary is one of the latter, because it certainly takes its inspirations from all over the place, but it fails to make all the rather good ideas work together toward the same goal. Hence, despite the nice graphics and the functional gameplay mechanics, the insanely linear and repetitive levels can seriously harm the overall experience, especially when non-skippable cutscenes are thrown into the mix as well.

As far as the story is concerned, it all starts when a guy by the name of Deckard somehow gets his hands on the real Pandora's box. Naturally, certain circumstances force him to open it, which in turn turns everyone's worst nightmare loose in the world, including mythological monsters, werewolves and various other powerful demons. As you would expect, the role of Deckard is played by you throughout the game, in an attempt to fix your mistakes and bring the world back to normal.

The linearity of the levels is worthy of a second mention, because it truly breaks everything that sort of worked, such as the lovely architecture and the nicely modeled monsters. However, having to follow a strict and narrow path through these environments can be incredibly frustrating, coupled with the fact that your character is only able to jump high enough to maybe make it up on a sidewalk, if you face it just right. In case you happen to stumble into a cutscene that plays before a slightly more difficult encounter, then you'll have to re-watch it every time you die and respawn at the previous checkpoint, since there is no skip function either.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, you must use a combination of gun play and magic to get around, although the latter is only viable for a very slow form of healing and a knockback attack, which can be used to disorient and put down enemies that surround you. The AI is quite well done, for a change, although boss fights can quickly get repetitive and annoying. Moreover, the legendary creatures are pretty rare, except for the werewolves, which are almost omnipresent.

In the end, Legendary cannot be called a bad game per se, since it does feature a good set of ideas and gameplay mechanics, but it is stubborn enough to ruin them with linearity and poor level design. Moreover, the developers did not take full advantage of the mythological creatures gimmick, since there are too few of them throughout the gameplay.