Open the PandoraEngine.ini (C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Games\Legendary\PandoraGame\Config-Folder) and search for
"MaxSmoothedFrameRate=300" and play around with the value. I had to change mine to 30 in order to get it to work, but some have had success with 60 or other values. Good luck.
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Mythology has always fascinated me - specifically mythological creatures. As a child, I practically inhaled anything to do with dragons, griffins, trolls, ogres, etc. I've probably read just about every book and seen just about every movie that features these monsters, and I continue to search for more. That said, I was very excited about the first-person shooter Legendary, by Atari, which promised epic battles with some of the fiercest creatures from various mythologies around the world.
In Legendary, you play as a thief named Jack Deckard, who is commissioned to steal the mythological artifact Pandora's Box. Mr. Deckard, however, is apparently a ginormous dumbass, and for some reason opens Pandora's Box before attempting to steal it (perhaps he lives under a rock and has never heard the idiom before, but I doubt that), unwittingly releasing a horde of savage creatures upon the planet. Fortunately, his arm is also emblazoned with "The Signet", which gives him some fairly cool mystical powers.
Deckard done a bad, bad thing.
Since he's pretty much screwed the whole of humanity, Deckard feels compelled to right his wrong (as I would) and fight the creatures, with the assistance of a secret society that is trying to find a way to put the creatures back into Pandora's Box. The plot thickens as yet another secret society (the bad guys) join the fray in an attempt to use the creatures to take over the world. The story is not what I would call deep or engrossing, and if I didn't like crappy Sci-Fi movies as much as I do, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have enjoyed this game at all...
Moving along to the graphics: Legendary's visuals are not by any means top notch by today's standards, although they would have been awesome about 6 or 7 years ago. That said, they aren't terrible, and there are a few specific places in the game that look pretty damn cool. You'll get to experience a small variety of landscapes, which include the monster-infested streets of both New York City and London; an ancient, creepy castle; subways, waterways, and underground tunnels; and several indoor facilities, including the stronghold of your arch-nemesis. Most of the environments are fairly well-done, the quality slightly less impressive than BioShock.
The creatures are the main draw of the game, and you can tell this is where the developers focused most of their attention. Legendary throws a satisfying variety of monsters at you, including werewolves, minotaurs, griffins, fire drakes, and pixies to name a few. Most of the creatures not only look great, but behave as one would expect a mythological abomination to. Werewolves are tough but agile, able to scale walls and hurl objects at you; griffins slash at you from the sky and shake the ground when they land; minotaurs tear through walls and other obstacles, wielding war hammers and ramming their prey with their horns. The two boss creatures - the golem and the kraken - are simply huge, and will stomp your ass into oblivion if you're not careful. Hell, they'll stomp your ass into oblivion even if you are careful. You gotta have respect for giant monsters.
"Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look to the sky with hope!
And let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake... the Kraken!"
Don't bother shooting the golem - your bullets can't harm him. He's kind of a bastard that way.
Legendary offers you a very limited variety of weapons, most of which work well enough. You start off with a hatchet, then eventually gain a pistol, shotgun, sub-machinegun, assault rifle, heavy machinegun, rocket launcher, molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and a flamethrower. Most of the weapons look pretty decent - albeit extremely generic - but only a few are really fun to use. For some reason, the developers of Legendary picked the the number of weapons you can carry as one of the very few aspects of the game they wanted to keep fairly realistic. Aside from the axe and throwable objects, you are only allowed to carry two weapons, so you'll often have to set one down to pick up another. This can be frustrating at times, as there might not be enough ammo available for your favorite weapon in certain places, so you'll have to sacrifice it for a weapon you might not enjoy as much.
Like many of its contemporaries, Legendary allows you to use iron sight aiming with most of its weapons, which is pretty cool.
The sound is as mediocre as everything else in the game, particularly the weapon sounds. The firearms sound ridiculously dull and non-threatening, which doesn't add much excitement to combat. The same is true for explosions - a detonating grenade sounds more like a water balloon popping that it does an explosion, which is pretty lame. Thankfully, most of the creature sounds are fairly appropriate, although they're nothing spectacular. The voice acting is decent for the most part, but there are a few horrible performances (mostly the male voice actors that try to pull off a British accent - and fail miserably). Overall, the audio in Legendary is just so-so.
The majority of the voice acting is okay, but whoever did the voice for this character is an obnoxious twit.
Legendary's gameplay is fairly unique, although it obviously borrows a little here and there from a few other games. The shooting is pretty straightforward, as one would imagine. After killing a creature, however, you have the ability to absorb its "animus", by using the signet on your arm. Stored animus allows you to heal yourself, perform energy attacks that knock back enemies, or interact with special objects or devices. These little perks come in handy, but animus isn't always easy to come by. Only mythological creatures will yield animus when killed (human opponents simply fall over and die), and most creatures require some sort of unique action to be taken in order to more effectively dispatch them. Werewolves, for example, must be decapitated after they are knocked down, or else they will rise again and attack, and minotaurs are especially vulnerable when their backs are facing you (which is usually accomplished by dodging a charging minotaur and then opening up on it when it passes). Most of the creatures are downright tough, and it will usually require quite a few bullets to bring them down.
Ummm... ouch?
Minotaurs carry large hammers and are friggin' hard to kill.
Overall, Legendary isn't a bad game. Its graphics, sounds, and story line are severely lacking for a game made in 2008, but regardless it is still a fun game to play (probably no more than one time through, though). I wouldn't say that it's worth the $50 price tag, so you might want to wait for it to go down in price (or borrow it from a friend who was a big enough sucker to pay full price for it). I realize that it's gotten some pretty rough reviews, and although it certainly isn't anything close to the greatest game ever made, I'm not sure it deserves such negative press. I played through the entire game once, and aside from one very annoying glitch (clipping through the elevator on the last level - the solution to which can be found here) I enjoyed it immensely. In summation: Legendary is a game I would definitely recommend, but not at the current price.
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