Legendary: Maybe we shouldn’t open Pandora’s Box.

I kind of miss the seventh generation of shooters. Sometimes you’d find a game that while not amazing, was at least trying something interesting. Other times you could end up stuck in the sluice gate of Activision’s budget hell, with games like Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Jurassic: The Hunted or The History Channel: Battle for the Pacific. (By the way, those are all by the same developer: Cauldron, a Slovakian game studio that’s since been absorbed into Bohemia Interactive.) But regardless, I miss that B to C-tier type of game, something to waste a few hours of your time with that might’ve had promise but couldn’t deliver for whatever reason. And the game I’m talking about this time around definitely fits that criteria perfectly. Time to open up Pandora’s Box with this one.

Legendary – which is such a very generic title that it definitely will be hard to find info on in Google searches – is a first-person shooter that definitely fits this seventh gen C-tier mold. Developed by Spark Unlimited, a developer best known releasing Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and this game in the same calendar year, as well as working on the third game in the Lost Planet series and a Ninja Gaiden spinoff before closing up shop just as the seventh generation was coming to a close. They definitely were a C-tier developer.

This game was also published by the rather infamous Gamecock Media Group, a publisher that was known for having fairly aggressive marketing tactics. In essence, they were basically the proof of concept of what would become Devolver Digital. (Fitting, since Mike Wilson was one of the head honchos at Gamecock, as well as Devolver.) I tend to remember them for storming the stage during the Spike Video Game Awards while Irrational Games’ Ken Levine was about to give a speech to promote Hail to the Chimp. Besides that, I couldn’t tell you any other game they published that was memorable besides these two games.

Anyway, the story goes a little something like this: You play as Charles Deckard, a generic white dude protagonist who’s a graduate of the Gordon Freeman school of FPS character development. Deckard is given an offer from Osmond LeFey, leader of the sinister-sounding Black Order, to procure Pandora’s Box, which is conveniently hidden in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After sneaking in and inserting a fancy key and a blood sacrifice, all hell breaks loose, as Pandora’s Box opens a portal to evil gods and beings flooding the city. With the help of Vivian Kane and his new Signet powers, Deckard must close up Pandora’s Box, while making sure LeFey doesn’t get it for evil nefarious deeds that evil nefarious villains do.

Legendary is a bog-standard FPS for the time. WASD moves, Left click to fire, right click to aim down sights, Shift sprints, E uses objects. Deckard can only hold two weapons, following the Halo/Call of Duty formula, alongside his trusty axe and two explosives that you switch between. Despite taking several pages from the 6th-7th generation FPS ethos, there are a few things it tries to do differently, such as no regenerating health, and fancy powers thanks to the Signet on his arm. Though, Deckard also has the cool ability to turn valves and “hack” keypads to open doors.

Deckard’s abilities really boil to down to two things: A kinetic blast that helps destroy objects and stuns Pandora’s foes, and healing yourself. I ended up using the blast a lot to make certain foes easier to fight, and a few times for destroying physics objects when the game asked me to, but the heal feature was the most helpful. That is, if I could find places to heal and have enough animus energy to even heal in the first place.

To refill your Animus, you have to stop and use glowy bits around the arena or off the corpses of Pandora’s enemies, which really kills the game flow. You gotta stop to heal or refill Pandora’s energy, and it takes time to do while in the midst of combat, so it ends up coming off a bit jerky. This game also throws regular soldiers alongside the Pandora monsters, who don’t give Animus energy and are impervious to the Blast ability, thus it ends up being more a hindrance than a cool ability.

It’s a shame the whole Animus thing gets so underutilized. The potential for Deckard to have super soldier abilities a la Crysis would’ve been a nice little twist to the shooter formula, as that game was only a year old when this came out. There’s not even the opportunity to grab and throw physics objects at enemies like in Half-Life 2, which while derivative, would’ve been at least something.

A lot of the game uses concept art and still frames of gameplay for cutscenes, which I assume was done strictly as a cost-cutting measure. While that may seem stylistic, it doesn’t work as the overall art design is realistic – at least by 2008 standards – thus it clashes too much. Legendary is no Max Payne here. It reminds me of similar games that use comic book cutscenes, like the adaptation of Battle: Los Angeles. (There’s a great article from Cassidy on the Bad Game Hall of Fame about that game, you can check it out here.) Hell, a good chunk of cutscenes are done in full motion video, presumably because having it run in real time would’ve probably killed the framerate. These are unskippable, which can be annoying when they play just before a boss section later on.

The comic-like cutscenes also show how unfinished this game feels at times. The beginning level starts with Deckard already inside the museum and activating Pandora’s Box. There could’ve been potential to make it a slow burn like Half-Life where you explore before things go haywire, but they opted not to do that, instead making a comic scene that gives the backstory you can watch before actually playing the game. You’re likely noticing a pattern here.

As for the audio, it’s… fine. Voice acting’s passable, if unremarkable. The sounds of enemies are mostly forgettable, and the shooting sounds mediocre compared to the weapons I’m firing. The music, however, is the game’s saving grace. Most of it is chugging guitars and heavy drum beats that would be right at home in someone’s garage nu-metal band, but for this kind of game, it fits more than a traditional score would. In fact, this game would get a soundtrack release, back when practically every seventh generation game somehow had a soundtrack. Maybe I’ll talk about it sometime…

Legendary hits all the marks that a shooter of this era hits: Flashy set pieces that are marred by average shooting. There’s no satisfaction to the combat, enemies just ragdoll like it’s nothing. There’s a handful of cool animations that would look neat in a trailer or an animator’s highlight reel, but you can only do that so many times before it becomes monotonous. The first few stages are polished in such a way that they rightfully understood to give a good first impression to the player, but that starts petering out by the time we get to having to fight tentacle monsters in sewer levels.

Even after making a brief pilgrimage around the streets of London, complete with a scene where Big Ben is destroyed, we’re not given a further globetrotting adventure, we’re sent back into New York to fight more werewolves and Black Order soldiers broken up occasionally by fighting Minotaurs or Griffons in new arenas before entering the Black Order HQ. It really feels like they hastily added this in to get the game done in time, and it shows.

That’s all for the campaign. There’s also multiplayer, but it’s not really worth talking much about. As opposed to a conventional Team Deathmatch, you have to eliminate creatures to feed your team’s Animus before your opponents do. Every game from this era had a multiplayer mode shoehorned in, and this is no exception. Bonus: this was “Powered by Gamespy,” as most games were around this time, and has since been shut down. There does seem to be ways around it, as I somehow found videos of multiplayer gameplay as recently as 2023, which is honestly surprising to me.

So there’s something that’s on my mind as I talk about Legendary: Why did Spark Unlimited try to bite off more than they could chew here? Around the same time they were making Legendary, they had just pushed out Turning Point: Fall of Liberty for Codemasters, during that brief phase where Codemasters wanted to be a more conventional publisher rather than being just the racing game guys. Unless you’re a 5000-person development studio, having to make two big full-fledged games has to be incredibly taxing on the developers.

Both games have very similar premises: Generic white dude protagonists caught in an unfortunate situation – Nazis invading 1950s-era New York in Turning Point, Deckard opening Pandora’s Box and flooding the world with monsters in Legendary – who with some help has to stop the big bad – Nazis or the Black Order – from conquering the world. Both games start out in New York, eventually go to London, before looping back to New York at the end. Both have that sort of shooter jank that you see in most C-tier games from this generation: Enemy AI that “exists” in that it can shoot you dead, linear areas with no sense of exploration, and interesting set pieces that are bogged down by technical problems. At least Legendary feels more overall put together, Turning Point has a lot of UI elements that look like unfinished Unreal Engine 3 development text.

My thinking is: Why make two games with similar premises and release them in the same calendar year? With there being a good chunk of similarities, they could’ve easily made these two games become one big game: Nazis find and open Pandora’s Box, Deckard and Carson (the Turning Point guy) could’ve stopped the Nazis and the Black Order while also trying to recover the box. Would it have been good? Ehhh, that’s debatable. But there would’ve been less development headaches for everyone involved.

I feel bad for a lot of the folks who had to work on this. The beginning in New York has a lot of really good environmental art, and despite some occasionally janky animations, the game does has some promise. They went to great lengths to add a bunch of lore to a game that’s otherwise a straightforward shooter. I could see elements of games like Half-Life 2 in this game’s DNA, but it definitely feels like a second draft rather than a final product.

I keep thinking Legendary got bogged down by something. Executive meddling from Gamecock? Project leaders who didn’t have a clue how to lead? Or was it just a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth? We may never know unless someone decides to tell the tale.

Legendary is a perfect 6/10 kind of game. It’s got its heart in the right place, it knows what it wants to do, but for various reasons, it couldn’t fulfill its promises. It being released literally a week before Call of Duty: World at War didn’t help matters. I have a soft spot for this game, but keep in mind that I tend to be more forgiving of average games like these compared to most people. It’s an otherwise average game, definitely more put together than Turning Point, and out of all the Spark Unlimited games I’ve played this is probably their best work. Which is kinda damning to say for a development studio that never really had an outstanding game to me.

Legendary is on Steam, and if you wanna waste time on a half-decent shootybang for 6 bucks, you could do much worse than this. Who knows, maybe you’ll be a small fan of it like I was. This game definitely has its defenders, for sure.

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