X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is divided into five acts. The game starts with the conquest of Genosha, which a mutant city founded by Magneto. The conqueror is none other than Apocalypse, an extremely powerful mutant who seems bent on taking over the world. In the meantime, he needs some specific mutant DNA for a mysterious project, and kidnaps several mutants in the hopes that they will fit the bill. Assisting Apocalypse are his four Horsemen, who make formidable opponents when you encounter them at the end of each Act. In order to beat this unprecedented threat, the X-Men and the Brotherhood agree to team up. As the head of a team of four mutants, your ultimate task as team leader is to stop Apocalypse and rescue his victims.

As you work against Apocalypse, your base of operations changes depending on where in the world you’re needed. You are given several missions to complete in each act. Most missions end with a mini-boss to defeat, which serves as a nice warm up to the big boss at the end of each act. These minor bosses come from various chapters of the X-Men canon, a point that will please the serious fan.

In addition to completing missions and moving forward in the game, you can collect items like homing beacons and data discs that will unlock special bonus content. You can also find and collect discs that unlock areas of the Danger Room, comic books and concept art. These items are not strictly necessary to advance the story, but add a bit of a challenge for players who really want the special content. If you play your cards right, you can unlock three special characters at the end of the game.

To assist you in building the ultimate team, most playable characters are available right away. This is different from X-Men Legends, where you had to unlock characters before you could have them on your team. You can change your team whenever you like (at an Xtraction Point, of course). You can also change the characters’ skins to reflect the classic costumes (yellow spandex, anyone?) or a more modern look. Thus, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is less about discovering the X-Men universe and more about having all of it to command at will. Yes, long-time X-Men fans probably have an advantage over the rest of us, but even if you only know the X-Men from the movies you’ll be able to enjoy yourself. Other than there being an occasional need for a specific skill, like flying and bridge building, it feels like you can run just about any set of characters and come out fine. However, as things progress to Acts 4 and 5, it’s best to have a set of characters you’re comfortable with running and that have attained a decent skill level. It’s really tempting to bring out different characters all the time since they’re available, but you may find yourself underpowered going into the final battle unless you’ve concentrated on a specific team.

Since this is an action RPG, you have to manage several aspects of your characters. As your team levels up, they gain points that can be assigned to their available skills. Those skills are much more developed than in the original game. Each mutant has a different set of skills that are appropriate for their roles. Plus, they actually use their skills effectively when on NPC mode. There’s also a loot system that pays off as you play. You pick up cash and gear by killing bad guys and bashing boxes. The gear is used to equip your characters and the cash can be used to buy better gear or skill-ups. You can set the game to auto-assign skill points and gear alike, but your characters will be more powerful if you manage it manually.

While manual character management is probably the best way to go, it leads into my biggest pet peeve in the game. The PC version of X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse looks and plays like the console version with some changes, like assignable key mappings, but you’re still playing with a keyboard and mouse. Clicking on a row in a list makes the cursor step through each item in the list, because if you were using a controller you would be using the up and down arrows. The default key controls are a bit arbitrary at times and I found myself yelling at the screen more than once because I hit the enter key and it closed the screen, again. You can reassign the keys but no matter how you assign them you are still left with having movement controls, character selection controls, power button controls, and camera controls. It felt like these issues were more related to the clumsy nature of using the keyboard and mouse for what is essentially a console game. PC perks aside, I think it would be easier and more natural to play with a controller.

This is probably related to the keyboard issue, but movement was a bit frustrating at times, especially when fighting. I had some difficulty targeting opponents. I would think my character was aimed at the opponent only to have the attack goes off in a completely different direction. Also, camera angles were bad. There needs to be more adjustment available in camera angles and in zooming in and out. There are also some pathing issues that got frustrating at times, as well as some head-scratching bugs. For example, there are several points where I needed a character to fly to retrieve an item. After the character flew over and retrieved the item, the other members of the team somehow re-joined him even though they could not fly themselves. Not only are there are a few annoying bugs like this one, but there are also bugs that will completely halt your progress.

Graphically, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse looks almost identical to X-Men Legends - why mess with what works? The backgrounds and sets were clear and well-detailed, and I like that most elements in the sets were selectable (and thus could be destroyed). The character models have a cell-shaded look which makes them look more like actual comic-book characters with outlines around the characters. However, it looks like a lot of time and effort was spent on character movement and appearance. The cut scenes especially were well-rendered. This was a plus of playing the PC version since I know the console version would not look as good on a TV as it did on my LCD monitor.

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is a worthy follow-up to the popular X-Men Legends. While the original showed us that licensed games can be fun to play, the sequel polishes some of the rough edges and is even more fun to play. Even though it is a sequel, it stands on its own as a great game, and you don’t need to be an X-Men expert to enjoy it. Just pick your favorite team and save the world.