Legend has it that nice guy Prometheus had the misfortune of stealing fire from the gods so that we regular humans could keep our feet warm when it rains and so that pirates could make beef jerky.

   Zeus thought that this was rather rude, and after knuckle sandwiching nice guy Prometheus, decided to bitch-slap the entire human race for the lulz. He devised a most devious plan of putting all the evils of the world - famine, poverty, disease, Uwe Bowl films, and so on - into a box (actually a jar, but hey) and giving it to Pandora, the first woman on Earth. Pandora, being a creature of the naturally curious sort, opened the jar, the evils were released, and that was the end of that.

   To all of which developer Spark Unlimited and publisher Gamecock Media Group said, "O'RLY?"

Gamecock Media Group Proudly Presents

   You play the game as Charles Deckard, a character only slightly more multidimensional than a retarded panda. Legendary's slideshow intro sequence quickly introduces Charles as an arts thief working for an elderly gentleman inconspicuously named LeFey.

   The rest of the not-particularly-coherent slideshow tells the story of how after recovering and thoroughly studying the Pandora's Box (that looks oddly reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark ) the scientists collectively give up on it and put it where it belongs - that is, in a museum. LeFey hires the protagonist to steal the contents of the box, and this is precisely where the game actually begins.

   Our first in-game cutscene shows Charles Deckard, being the expert thief that he is, walking into the museum in broad daylight and sticking LeFey's key into the artifact. Upon the opening of Pandora's Box the city of New York is immediately invaded by werewolves, griffons, some minotaurs, and a bunch of beefed up fire-breathing Komodo dragon sort of things.

   Charles grabs an axe and heads for the exit.

Mommy, why is that man drooling on himself?

Sucking Animus. "Sucking" being the operative word.

   The gameplay is straightforward. Take the gun, shoot the monster. Pick up a bigger gun, shoot the bigger monster. The only deviation here from the standard run-and-gun routine is the health pickup system. Apparently opening the Pandora's Box had a nice side-effect of giving Mister Deckard the power to suck in the life essence of the monsters he slays (in honor of Altair, of Assassin's Creed fame, this life essence is called Animus here). So instead of med-kits and Half-Life-esque health stations, you just press a button and suck in a glowing substance that's left behind every non-human corpse in the game.

   This mechanic, while making the game easier, completely takes away from the feel of fighting for your life. Instead, it makes the player feel like the hunter instead of the hunted. After all, the more corpses you leave behind, the more chances of survival you get. This would've worked fine for Duke Nukem, but Charles Deckard's not that badass. Not even close.

   Navigating your less-than-badass main character through Legendary's levels, no matter how linear, can become an annoyance, especially considering the fact that when Charles jumps he never manages to get his feet higher than two centimeters off the ground. I like to fancy the idea that Spark Unlimited were originally working on an FPS where the hero blasts off baddies from a rocket-powered wheelchair, and just never got around to changing the main character's jump height when they decided to take their title in a different direction.

   Speaking of directions, the terrible puzzles in the first couple of hours of play do not help either. Luckily for us, the level designers either simply gave up on the puzzles later in the game, or threw the man responsible to the werewolves.

Good Wolves

   Your standard issue LeFey ground troopers are brainwashed to the point that no brain matter remains, I'm afraid. Their favorite (and only) tactics are to run straight for you and to run (straight) away from you. Strangely enough they're the toughest enemies the game has since the programmers decided to make up for non-existent AI with aimbot accuracy.

   Then there are the werewolves. These are actually pretty neat. They jump around, hurl random objects at you, climb surfaces, and are genuinely fun to fight. You have to either shoot or chop their heads off to make them stay dead, too.

   A couple of notable moments are owned to the pixies, which most closely resemble evil looking baby bastards. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to see an evil looking baby bastard in real life, but these pixies look just like them. In one segment of the game they possess a soda dispenser and hurl soda cans at you.

   All in all, though, the bestiary is nothing special, perhaps with the exception of the Kraken you fight mid-game while it tries to eat the Parliament of the United Kingdom (God save the Queen).

Zeus Pities the Fools

   I've had to search the Internets on how to edit some of the game files just so that I could get past a bug in the last level (I kept falling to oblivion straight through an elevator floor). Yes, Legendary may be broken, and the AI is dumber than Down's Syndrome, and yes, it sports some amazingly terrible writing. But the matter of the fact is that I *did* edit those files just so that I could get to the (fantastically unsatisfying) end of a game that no one forced me to play.

   Why? Because the game's developers did one thing right - they never let me get bored. And I wanted to see what happens next in the stupefying story, and I wanted to see another scripted scene where a griffon rips through a werewolf's torso or a werewolf bites some poor chap's head off, and I wanted to see how it all ends.

   Some game critics would have you believe that this game is a terrible piece of trash and a disgrace to the genre (clearly not all critics played Corridor 7: Alien Invasion), but it's not. Legendary is by no means terrible. It's just not very good. In a legendary kind of way, of course.

       ... Max Salnikov