Legendary - First Look Preview

Legendary (previously known as Legendary: The Box) has a distinctly Resistance: Fall of Man feel to it. Perhaps it's that the slightly hunched werewolves in the game that look slightly like the xenomorphs from Resistance, or maybe it's that half of this American developed FPS is set in England. In essence, the games are completely different. Legendary has you fighting hordes of mythical creatures that are released from Pandora's Box, while Resistance pits the player against necromancers in the wake of World War II. Nevertheless, having had a touch of hands on play in our first look at Legendary, we can't peel ourselves away from the comparison between the two shooters.

Something that the developers of Legendary, Spark Unlimited, will definitely want to avoid in their recreations of rural Durham and London are the blatant anachronisms that were all over Resistance (not to mention stern criticisms from the Church of England). This is a point not lost on Spark's CEO, Craig Allen:

"With the Resistance situation, we're certainly looking at those kinds of things. We have legal counsel that has looked into things. We're trying to walk that line between being realistic but not encroaching on copyrights or landmarks because of the trouble. But it's certainly something that people are more aware of after the Resistance situation than before."

Nevertheless, Legendary starts far away from the streets of London or, err, cows of rural Durham. Instead, things get underway in the Big Apple where the game's protagonist, Charles Deckard, is about to open the mystical Pandora's Box in a New York museum. As a well-schooled thief, Deckard has been employed by a Professor Lefey to steal various artefacts. Assisting Deckard in this aim is Lefey's assistant - and the game's potential love interest - Vivian Carter.

When Deckard attempts to steal Pandora's Box from the museum, however, he is quite surprised to see it unravel itself, revealing a handprint on its side. Naturally, Deckard can't help himself and places his hand in the groove, which has two rather unfortunate repercussions. Firstly, the box brands his hand with a mysterious Signet. Secondly, the box unleashes a vast swathe of ungodly creatures into the world - oops.

In a bid for survival, Deckard piles out onto the street where he's faced with huge explosions, cop cars being flung through the air by Griffins, and scurrying humans in all directions. It's here that Deckard has his first run-in with a Titan class creature called the Gollum. Essentially made up of rubble from the very fabric of New York's many buildings, this towering behemoth must be a good few hundred feet in height. We didn't see much combat with this beast but, apparently, one of the ways they will be utilised is to pave the way for Deckard through the city. Either way, they're pretty daunting.

We were also shown various other creatures in the game and it's instantly noticeable that there will be a lot of werewolves, of which there are two different categories: the Alpha Wolves and the Weak Wolves. They both have exactly the same abilities except that one is slightly weaker (no prizes for guessing which one). From what we can gather, though, it doesn't require a full moon for these werewolves to appear (neither do they need to be killed with a silver bullet in the foot - pumping them full of lead in the face seemed to suffice).

The most interesting feature of these mythical creatures is that Spark has given them AI that not only allows them to crawl up walls, but jump between opposing wall surfaces as well. The end result certainly looks good and is a challenge to play against as well, which makes us hope that Spark will reveal their secrets to Gearbox for their upcoming Aliens FPS (if only). It's also worth mentioning that these creatures can regenerate after you've blown their limbs off, while their flesh also actively tears away as you shoot at it - delightful.

There was also a chance during our first look of the game to get some hands on experience of fighting the Minotaur. Spark certainly has captured the sort of furious charges from the beast that you might expect. It hurtles through walls with ease and you certainly don't want to be on the business end of one of its head-butts. All in all, the Minotaur is a fairly challenging beastie to take on, which is encouraging at this early stage.

Griffins are essentially the air force in Pandora's little shop of horrors. We didn't see much of them but it certainly seems that you'll need your eyes on the skies when playing Legendary, lest you have them promptly clawed out by this mystical bird of prey with a 10 metre wingspan. One final beast, which we didn't get a chance to see in-game but we were told about, is the Firedrake. Essentially a large frog with no eyes and the toothy grin of a shark, this creature is full of molten lava inside its tough outer shell. This allows it to spew fire at its enemies, of which you're apparently one.

Whenever you kill any of the above beasts they release a substance called Animus that's kind of like plasma, and here's where the Signet branding on your wrist comes into play. The Signet ties you to these creatures' life force (the Animus) so, once you've killed them, you can suck up the Animus using your Signet. This has the effect of restoring your health, which is a nifty little dynamic. Additionally, when you're at full health you can let out a small pulse of energy with the Animus that sends nearby enemies flying. One final use for the Signet is that it gives Deckard the ability to close the box again, which is convenient to say the least.

This brings me nicely onto the game's story, which is made up of three main acts. The first act takes place in New York where all hell breaks loose (literally) after Deckard opens the box. Then the game moves on to London because the Houses of Parliament are apparently where a secret society called the Council of 98 have an outpost (as you do). The Council of 98 are fairly adamant that this Pandora's Box thing should be kept shut, mainly because they believe their founders were the ones to shut all those creatures in such a tiny box in the first place. They help Deckard to try and squeeze all those nasty beasties back in the box, which kind of makes them the good guys.

The game then moves onto Durham because this is the base of another secret society called The Black Order. These guys are the bad guys because they believe in progress at any cost (i.e. they'd sell their souls for a tidy profit). They want to control the creatures rather than get them back in the box, which is why you are fighting these crazed megalomaniacs.

The level we went hands on with took place during this act and having The Black Order around certainly opened up some interesting gameplay choices. Throughout the level we were fighting these Black Order people, although the creatures were trying to kill both sides. Occasionally this opened up a choice such as releasing a caged Alpha Wolf next to the Black Order people with carnage resulting. Of course, this then meant that you had to kill the werewolf later, but it's an interesting dynamic that we'd like to see much more of in the final game.

For the concluding part of the game you return to New York, which has now become some apocalyptic, jungle-like nightmare. You go back there in an attempt to close the box and return the beasts to whence they came. However, a spanner is thrown in the works when it appears you've been duped into allowing control of the beasts instead which, we're guessing, could be something to do with the fact that Professor Lefey turns out to be one of the Black Order people.

Our impressions of general gameplay during our brief hands on were fairly good. If you take away the mythic creatures then it's really quite a standard shooter using conventional weapons and familiar city environments. Gunplay passes the test at this early stage with no glaring inadequacies being present, and we're looking forward to more insane and arcane creatures to blast to smithereens later in the year when Legendary is released.

It's very difficult to give a well balanced appraisal of the visuals, simply because the build is still in an early state of development. The more polished parts are certainly passable, but even they are likely to be significantly spruced up before the third quarter release of the title. However, Legendary certainly portrays a very dense and busy game world at times, which can obviously be a strain on framerate (particularly where the PS3 version is concerned as Legendary is leading on the Xbox 360). Craig Allen responded to such worries:

"Because of the architectures of the systems, it does make it very difficult to bring game content from one to the other without a lot of heavy lifting and work. We use the Epic Unreal 3 engine as our base technology, and we've actually been very conservative about what we do in creating the game to make sure that we have the ability to bring the game experience from one system to another as easily as possible.

"We've actually got everything you've seen here running on the PS3 right now. There are other optimisations that you do for the PS3, mainly in terms of your texture memory and how you're handling certain kinds of processor usage, but we don't feel like there's going to be a significant challenge for us because of where we are right now in terms of how we've run the production."

As for the multiplayer offerings, Spark is promising that 8 players will be able to dual it out over two separate modes. One is a team deathmatch where a Black Order side will take on a Council of 98 side, while AI creatures will be present as a kind of wildcard enemy. The second mode, dubbed Safari at this stage, will see players trying to kill as many creatures as possible in an allotted time period.

One final point to note is that Craig Allen also told us that the team is aiming for a 30 hour long game with Legendary. That's a grand claim that would put Legendary firmly in the longest FPS title of 2008 category, so let's hope the finished product reflects that.