The basic gameplay is similar to a Diablo or Gauntlet style. You have four members in your group and you can control any one of the four that you want at the push of a button. It's nice that the AI for those that you are not in direct control of is decent and at times it is darn right good and you rarely have to do any backtracking to find lost members. You have both close and range attacks for your character. One of the interesting aspects of the game is how you can use the different abilities of individual members to help the team. For example you can use the range attack of one member of the group to stun an enemy and then have another member walk safely up to the bad guy and perform a close attack. The battles are entertaining and I found that the controls behaved themselves for the most part.

Mutant powers unleashed.

Graphically RoA isn't going to move you one way or the other with the exception of the cutscenes which are very well down. The style is slightly cell-shaded and colorful as you might expect. I did have trouble at times keeping track of which character I was controlling and where that character was. Heck, I had difficulties tracking down the bad guys at times. One more than one occasion I would find myself trying to attack someone on my team instead of the bad guy. There was just something a little confusing with distinguishing teammates, backgrounds, and enemies. This wasn't true for all the levels, just a couple. I was disappointed in the voice talent with the huge exception of Patrick Stewart as the voice of Professor X. Everyone else seem to have taken voice lessons from William Shatner...and that's not a good thing.

It's a given that in a game like this that you would want to bring some friends along to play with you., it's practically screaming out for multiplayer. Unfortunately the GameCube version does not allow online play. But if you happen to have three friends hanging out at your house you can get them in on the action and this is where the real fun is.

My last comment, neither positive or negative in and of itself, is that it really pays to know your X-Men trivia. There is even a mini game where you answer X-Men trivia for experience points. I didn't do very well with it but I could see that the true fan will go nuts over it and probably rack up a ton of XPs. You can even get special increases in certain group attributes by getting specific characters together in a team. So it is worth your gaming while to play around with the different outfits for each character and mix up the group to see what happened.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 82%.  X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is an enjoyable hybrid RPG/action game that is accessible to the novice X-Men fan but pays the bigger dividends to the true fan.

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