You’ve probably heard the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. If not, the X-Men and Brotherhood certainly have. A powerful mutant by the name of Apocalypse is trying to become even more powerful and is now threatening all of mankind. To counter this threat the perpetually warring X-Men and Brotherhood have joined forces and are actually, gasp, working together. What’s next? Dogs and cats living together?

Yep, that's Magneto on your team.

If you played X-Men Legends, the play in X-Men Legends II will be familiar to you. The game plays as a super hero themed action-RPG in the mold of the Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance games. You select a team of four mutants and fight your way through a number of environments as a seemingly endless stream of various and sundry enemies attempt to swarm you. Each mutant has your basic light and heavy attack and they do fairly well in bashing enemies, but if that’s all that the mutants brought to the table you’d be just as well rounding up a few soccer hooligans. Nope, beating Apocalypse is going to take some serious power – mutant power – and there is a fair amount of strategy in assembling the right team for the job. Wolverine is great for grinding it out and slicing your way through hordes of enemies, but backing him up with Cyclops’ beam so that you can whittle down attacking groups of enemies at range makes him even more effective. You can douse a wall of flames with Storm’s wind power to open a new pathway or have Iceman create a bridge of ice across a gap or … I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that there are a lot uses for each of the 16 mutant’s powers and they almost all come in handy at some point, but while it would be nice to bring everybody along you’re forced to keep your team to four mutants at time.

As in Legends you can instantly take control of any member of your four person mutant team. Simply press the d-pad in one of the four cardinal directions and you’ll be in full control of the corresponding mutant. Those mutants not under your control will fight by your side under the control of the game’s AI – or a friend’s not-so-artificial “I” as the game supports co-op play. The AI does a good job of controlling your other teammates and the game even lets you tweak the AI for each character to set their aggression level, preferred powers, etc.

Like most other RPGs, as your mutants defeat enemies they gain experience and once they’ve gain enough experience they advance to a new level. Higher levels mean improved stats and new powers, and the choices that you make when a mutant levels up allow you to customize their abilities. For example, you can beef Cyclops up into a brawler or make him primarily a ranged attacker. If all of this seems like too much work for you, then you’re in luck as the game will allow you to automate the entire process. Each time a mutant levels up the game distributes new points to the mutant’s attributes as it sees fit and you can continue on your merry way without ever visiting the stats screen. You may lose the ability to really customize each mutant, but the game does a good enough job at auto-leveling to allow you to beat the game. This is a godsend for action gamers who would rather not be bothered with the whole RPG side of the game.

X-Men Legends II’s teaming of the X-Men and Brotherhood is a good way to allow players to have some fun with the powers of the Brotherhood mutants while still fighting the good fight. It’s fun to be able to play as Magneto and crush opponents with metal objects in the area without having to use these powers to try and smash Rogue and Jean Grey to bits.

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