X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

THE BAD:
Gets very repetitive after about halfway through
Bosses lack challenge
Voice acting is minimal and repetitive, interesting cutscenes are few and far between.

SUMMARY:
Please note, this is based on playing the game all the way through on normal difficulty, I can't speak for the other difficulty levels.

I loved the first one of these games but I feel that while the second game has most of the original strengths, it's also lost some of the features that kept you interested from beginning to end. The bosses for a start are way too easy on normal play, I played through the entire game without losing a single team member to any of the bosses and that was not a matter of skill, they just aren't particularly challenging if you've been frugal with your health and energy packs and have some left for the big showdown.

They've also removed many of the interesting little mini tasks that made levels more interesting, welding objects and saving civilians against the clock, have been replaced with relentless hack and slash. The programmers have also been unwisely generous with the monetary system in the game, if you're used to playing Resident Evil or any similar game where you are rewarded for searching every nook and cranny for treasure and/or items useful for survival. That sounds great until you become positively rich in a very short time period and start buying character levels for your favourites. If you do this the game becomes positively dull in short order as the local henchmen are so overmatched as to become walkovers. They've also removed the interesting flashback game sequences from the first one, Wolverine's escape from Weapon X, the fight against Juggernaut. This throws away one of the most interesting (for fans of the comics) aspects of the first game, the chance to actually play out classic X-men conflicts. Allied to this is the fact that unlike the first game you aren't occasionally compelled to take along a particular character for a mission, this discourages experimentation with different characters.

In all then it's a solid enough game, and certainly an amusing enough way of whiling away a few hours, but with a little more original thought and challenges it could have been something really absorbing, and that's a sad waste.