I first read about Legendary in a magazine months before the game was released and i was hyped up with the idea of fighting fantasy monsters from various legends around the world in modern environments. The idea sounded excellent, but when the game came out, it got several negative reviews (it is always either positive or negative, nobody seems to give middle of the road reviews :-P), so i ignored it until a few years later when it was available for like $1 on a sale and bought it - but my computer at the time decided to break and i forgot about it until now.

So after playing "Rogue Warrior", another game that i found entertaining despite the "mixed" reviews here on Steam, i decided to see around my library for something that seemed to have a similar vibe and found Legendary, which unsurprisingly has also a "mixed" rating. Also i didn't notice it before, but it was published by Gamecock, a publisher that was founded (and now doesn't exist anymore) by the same people that founded Gathering of Developers (aka GOD Games) at the past and later would go to found Devolver Digital. I always liked the shooters those companies published, even if they weren't always well received (e.g. KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child), usually due to their lower budgets and often being made by new developers.

And indeed, Legendary seems to be more or less made from the same mold - sometimes it feels that the developers tried to bite more than they could chew, but it does look like they tried to make a good game even in the places where it stumbles a bit. Still, as long as you go in it with the understanding that it is not a big budget AAA production (even if at points it looks like it would like to be one and sometimes feels like they should have focused more on the bits they could do good and avoided the bits they weren't as good at) it is a genuinely entertaining game.

I do not really want to spoil the game, although i should note that starting a new game does not play the intro cinematic - you have to do that by selecting that option yourself from the Single player menu (it is right above New game).

As far as the gameplay goes, it is a mostly standard FPS game, with the AI being a bit clever but nothing special, although each enemy type has its own behavior which is very nice. It has a nice gimmick with the "animus" energy that mythical creatures (not humans) leave around when you kill them and you can collect, which you can use to heal yourself or create bursts of energy to stun the creatures (for some creatures this is a necessity to do).

As i wrote above, each enemy type has its own behavior and each need a different strategy to handle, with humans having the most common behavior (they run behind cover and pop out every now and then to attack you) and are the easiest to kill (a shotgun blast does the trick). Other monster types are Fire Drakes, which are easy to kill with a shotgun or the axe, but you can only harm them when they are about to attack (they spit fire or blasts) and they tend to curl up in a ball and run around (they are invincible in that state), werewolves which IMO are the most fun to battle (and also the most common mythical enemy after a point) since they aren't very tough - the alpha werewolves are, but not extremely so - but they seem like they have the smartest AI (mainly because they run around and climb up and down on walls) and in order to actually kill them you need to decapitate them (otherwise they'll wake up again) which adds an extra element of hurry. Another nice enemy type is the Nari, which are basically tiny fairies with talon-like legs that often fly around in flocks. Nari have the ability to become immaterial, passing through walls, floors, etc and become materialized either right before they attack you or with an animus blast which stuns them for a second or so, so you can gun them down. Their have very little health so they die quickly, but you can only attack whem while they are materialized and they immaterialize fast. Their most common way of attacking is hitting you with their talons or sometimes "possessing" items and throwing them at you (they can also manipulate the possessed item - i'm not going to spoil it, but there is a point in the game where a Nari possessed a deadly... item that had me laughing for its absurdity :-P).

Other enemy types are Griffin, Minotaurs and Blood Spiders. The last ones have the simplest behavior: they come at you and explode, so you have to find their mother (aka spawn point) and kill it (it dies quickly). The Griffin is initially very hard and you need a combination of animus blasts and firepower to kill a single one, but later in the game you often find rocket launchers in the vicinity and a single rocket will blast them to pieces. Minotaurs are both the hardest and the worst/most annoying enemies in the entire game: all they do is come at you (they even knock down obstacles) and once they are near enough they hit you with a gravestone (or something like that) they carry. And they are *very* tough, especially on the front side. They are supposedly easier to kill if you attack them from the back side, but this is easier to say than do since they always turn to face you and you cannot outmaneuver them unless you stun them with an animus blast. But this only lasts for a second and even with the most powerful weapon, this is not enough to bring them down - you'll run out of animus energy quickly, so a better idea is to just try and keep them in a distance and shoot them in the face. They'll still take a ridiculous amount of damage before dying though.

Fortunately these three enemy types are rarely seen and only used to spice up things (although in the case of Minotaurs there is a bit of too much spice), especially the Griffin. There are some other more specific enemy types (e.g. the Golem near the beginning of the game) but those are either mostly scripted to drive the game forward or confined in a single area of the game that you never see again (e.g. Echidna Tentacles). The scripted ones tend to be quite impressive despite the dated graphics, though.

As far as guns go, you can only carry two guns plus an axe and four grenades of two types (molotov and fragmentation). The guns you can carry are either a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher or one of a few machine gun types that escape me since i never cared about the details of them. There are three machine gun types, a weak (which is often found in enemy hands early), a middle powered one (which is often found in the "good guys" hands for most of the game and in enemy hands during the later parts of the game) and a very powereful one (which is found in the hands of a few enemies later in the game). Most of them are found in enemy hands (as mentioned) or lying around. There is no real reason to use the pistol as it becomes useless quickly and you do not see it for more than the first few levels.

Overall the game is of average length for a linear action game (it took me around 8 hours to finish it) and i had a lot of fun with it to the point where i think everyone was hard on it when it came out 10 years ago. It is not a masterpiece, but it has its moments and it is entertaining. Considering the current price (3 euros here), i'd recommend it hands down to anyone who likes playing FPS games, even if you play it in between bigger (and more hyped :-P) games.

A note of warning though. Apparently some people have issues with an elevator near the end. Old games like this (especially UE games) tend to have timing issues with modern fast computers, so i always run them with a framecapper (like RivaTuner Statistics Server) at 60fps. This tends to fix a ton of problems with old games, so i highly recommend using one as i didn't encounter that problem myself. Also i highly recommend checking PCGamingWiki for a tool to increase the FOV (i used 105 myself without issues) and info to disable mouse smoothing which improves responsiveness.

I first read about Legendary in a magazine months before the game was released and i was hyped up with the idea of fighting fantasy monsters from various legends around the world in modern environments. The idea sounded excellent, but when the game came out, it got several negative reviews (it is always either positive or negative, nobody seems to give middle of the road reviews :-P), so i ignored it until a few years later when it was available for like $1 on a sale and bought it - but my computer at the time decided to break and i forgot about it until now. So after playing "Rogue Warrior", another game that i found entertaining despite the "mixed" reviews here on Steam, i decided to see around my library for something that seemed to have a similar vibe and found Legendary, which unsurprisingly has also a "mixed" rating. Also i didn't notice it before, but it was published by Gamecock, a publisher that was founded (and now doesn't exist anymore) by the same people that founded Gathering of Developers (aka GOD Games) at the past and later would go to found Devolver Digital. I always liked the shooters those companies published, even if they weren't always well received (e.g. KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child), usually due to their lower budgets and often being made by new developers. And indeed, Legendary seems to be more or less made from the same mold - sometimes it feels that the developers tried to bite more than they could chew, but it does look like they tried to make a good game even in the places where it stumbles a bit. Still, as long as you go in it with the understanding that it is not a big budget AAA production (even if at points it looks like it would like to be one and sometimes feels like they should have focused more on the bits they could do good and avoided the bits they weren't as good at) it is a genuinely entertaining game. I do not really want to spoil the game, although i should note that starting a new game does not play the intro cinematic - you have to do that by selecting that option yourself from the Single player menu (it is right above New game). As far as the gameplay goes, it is a mostly standard FPS game, with the AI being a bit clever but nothing special, although each enemy type has its own behavior which is very nice. It has a nice gimmick with the "animus" energy that mythical creatures (not humans) leave around when you kill them and you can collect, which you can use to heal yourself or create bursts of energy to stun the creatures (for some creatures this is a necessity to do). As i wrote above, each enemy type has its own behavior and each need a different strategy to handle, with humans having the most common behavior (they run behind cover and pop out every now and then to attack you) and are the easiest to kill (a shotgun blast does the trick). Other monster types are Fire Drakes, which are easy to kill with a shotgun or the axe, but you can only harm them when they are about to attack (they spit fire or blasts) and they tend to curl up in a ball and run around (they are invincible in that state), werewolves which IMO are the most fun to battle (and also the most common mythical enemy after a point) since they aren't very tough - the alpha werewolves are, but not extremely so - but they seem like they have the smartest AI (mainly because they run around and climb up and down on walls) and in order to actually kill them you need to decapitate them (otherwise they'll wake up again) which adds an extra element of hurry. Another nice enemy type is the Nari, which are basically tiny fairies with talon-like legs that often fly around in flocks. Nari have the ability to become immaterial, passing through walls, floors, etc and become materialized either right before they attack you or with an animus blast which stuns them for a second or so, so you can gun them down. Their have very little health so they die quickly, but you can only attack whem while they are materialized and they immaterialize fast. Their most common way of attacking is hitting you with their talons or sometimes "possessing" items and throwing them at you (they can also manipulate the possessed item - i'm not going to spoil it, but there is a point in the game where a Nari possessed a deadly... item that had me laughing for its absurdity :-P). Other enemy types are Griffin, Minotaurs and Blood Spiders. The last ones have the simplest behavior: they come at you and explode, so you have to find their mother (aka spawn point) and kill it (it dies quickly). The Griffin is initially very hard and you need a combination of animus blasts and firepower to kill a single one, but later in the game you often find rocket launchers in the vicinity and a single rocket will blast them to pieces. Minotaurs are both the hardest and the worst/most annoying enemies in the entire game: all they do is come at you (they even knock down obstacles) and once they are near enough they hit you with a gravestone (or something like that) they carry. And they are *very* tough, especially on the front side. They are supposedly easier to kill if you attack them from the back side, but this is easier to say than do since they always turn to face you and you cannot outmaneuver them unless you stun them with an animus blast. But this only lasts for a second and even with the most powerful weapon, this is not enough to bring them down - you'll run out of animus energy quickly, so a better idea is to just try and keep them in a distance and shoot them in the face. They'll still take a ridiculous amount of damage before dying though. Fortunately these three enemy types are rarely seen and only used to spice up things (although in the case of Minotaurs there is a bit of too much spice), especially the Griffin. There are some other more specific enemy types (e.g. the Golem near the beginning of the game) but those are either mostly scripted to drive the game forward or confined in a single area of the game that you never see again (e.g. Echidna Tentacles). The scripted ones tend to be quite impressive despite the dated graphics, though. As far as guns go, you can only carry two guns plus an axe and four grenades of two types (molotov and fragmentation). The guns you can carry are either a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher or one of a few machine gun types that escape me since i never cared about the details of them. There are three machine gun types, a weak (which is often found in enemy hands early), a middle powered one (which is often found in the "good guys" hands for most of the game and in enemy hands during the later parts of the game) and a very powereful one (which is found in the hands of a few enemies later in the game). Most of them are found in enemy hands (as mentioned) or lying around. There is no real reason to use the pistol as it becomes useless quickly and you do not see it for more than the first few levels. Overall the game is of average length for a linear action game (it took me around 8 hours to finish it) and i had a lot of fun with it to the point where i think everyone was hard on it when it came out 10 years ago. It is not a masterpiece, but it has its moments and it is entertaining. Considering the current price (3 euros here), i'd recommend it hands down to anyone who likes playing FPS games, even if you play it in between bigger (and more hyped :-P) games. A note of warning though. Apparently some people have issues with an elevator near the end. Old games like this (especially UE games) tend to have timing issues with modern fast computers, so i always run them with a framecapper (like RivaTuner Statistics Server) at 60fps. This tends to fix a ton of problems with old games, so i highly recommend using one as i didn't encounter that problem myself. Also i highly recommend checking PCGamingWiki for a tool to increase the FOV (i used 105 myself without issues) and info to disable mouse smoothing which improves responsiveness.