X-Men Legends II - Rise of Apocalypse

Putting Magneto on the player's side was the smartest thing Raven Software did with this sequel. The first X-Men Legends had the school, the students, the tidy moral shape of a team book. This one opens with Apocalypse's Horsemen tearing through Genosha and forces the X-Men into the Brotherhood's company, which means Sabretooth and Toad standing in your four-slot lineup next to Storm and Colossus. It is a comics premise that most licensed games would have written around. Here it is the structure.

The loop is isometric, cooperative and unapologetically about numbers going up. Four mutants on screen, crowds of Apocalypse's infantry, powers on face buttons, and a constant trickle of experience feeding skill trees that let you push Cyclops toward a wide sweeping beam or a focused one. Equipment slots, costume unlocks and team bonuses reward you for building squads with some thematic logic rather than picking the four highest damage numbers, and the game quietly nudges you toward experimenting because characters left on the bench fall behind in level. Nightcrawler teleporting past a locked door, Iceman bridging a gap, Colossus shrugging off a collapse: traversal is handled by mutant power rather than a key hunt, and it keeps the environments feeling like they were built for these specific bodies.

What holds it together is the drop-in couch play. Four controllers, one screen, no ceremony. It arrived at the tail end of the era when that was still the default assumption for a game like this, and playing it now with three other people is a reminder of how much was lost when co-op moved online and started requiring accounts.

The seams show. Camera angles fight you in tight corridors, the loot is largely a stream of small percentage modifiers you stop reading, and boss encounters lean on damage sponges more than they lean on ideas. The Egyptian and Astral Plane stretches drag. But the writing has more affection for its source than the licence required, the voice work is committed, and the character-building actually rewards attention across a long campaign.

It is the rare superhero game that understands a roster is not a menu but a set of arguments about who works with whom.