Chaos Legion

Giving the benefit of the doubt is one of the luxuries I seem to be blessed with, so when I heard of the reputation of the next game I had to review, Chaos Legion, I put it down to a question of taste and expectation rather than it being a bad game. Chaos Legion takes the style of Devil May Cry, a third person monster slaying swordplay action epic and adds a helper to the mix in the form of a summon-able ‘legion’ of creatures who will fight for you.

The game starts like many others: a very well made FMV setting up the story, with a short tutorial level masquerading as a prologue. Swarms of enemies swiftly attack you, as Sieg, and your legion backs you up by smacking the various creatures around the pretty well textured and realised locations. Of course the trouble comes when most of the fourteen overly linear levels look alike, and all of your objectives are simple variations on two themes.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Utter confusion... the only solution being ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!

It looks like Capcom have considered game development to be much like washing your hair… if you get a good dandruff free shiny result with one shampoo then the next time you need to wash your hair, if you use the same shampoo you’ll get the same blissful gleam. Unfortunately, in the gaming world, you’ll just get a repetitive feeling game. I began to worry that originality and any uniqueness was out of the window, until the end of the second level, when suddenly a whole new upgrade system for your legions is unveiled, which lets you give them extra abilities, increase the number of them that are fighting for you or just increase their strength and defence.

When each of the seven legions is equipped (limited to two at a time), you’ll get a few different attributes to fight with yourself - from the ability to double jump to stronger combination attacks - and with each successful hit on an enemy your experience points for the level increases. At the end of each section your performance is judged and appropriate experience point bonuses are given, all allowing you to upgrade your legions, each of which have different attacks and powers from a crossbow fired electricity bolt to living bombs that run up to your target and blow themselves up.

Artistic licence

The imaginary worlds in which the game takes place are all designed well, although they are quite simple in many places, which seems fine considering the amount of creatures on screen at once (occasional slowdowns do take place in extreme cases). The characters animate well, with the exception of Seig’s walking animation which looks more like gliding on ice to me - thankfully this is saved by the effects present with each attack.

Musically, the game is pretty strong with powerful and partially dynamic orchestral music present at most times. It seems that the sound effects often overpower the music in the midst of a large battle, which feels natural, especially with the strength of each sound amplified when dealing with multiple hostiles at once. Voice acting is limited to the FMV sequences, which are well performed for a video game and fit the characters. Interestingly though the original Japanese voices are available to hear in place of the English ones in each movie sequence if you finish the game.

Delacroix has lost the plot

The level where you don't play as Sieg is good, not least for the high kicks.

Your main objective is to stop Victor Delacroix, who has apparently fallen into darkness. Troubled by the death of someone close, he feels that the only way to reunite her with him is to cleanse the world and join all souls by, you guessed it, destroying everything and sending it into chaos. Of course twists a plenty and general evil scheming is the order of the day, including another playable character (for a single level in the first play through, while if you perform well you can choose her to replay the whole game) that joins your fight.

Your own control method will be familiar to those who have played Devil May Cry, but a somewhat annoying camera system that requires you to use the right analogue stick to rotate your view can make the otherwise natural controls fail you at a critical moment. Commanding your legion is as simple as hitting a button which alternates defending you and going out to attack enemies in their range, while if you lock on to a target (strangely by throwing a painless limited range energy bolt), your legion in question will focus on that enemy specifically.

Evening the odds

Guns... lots of guns. Well, at least there are these two in the game.

Fortunately, that’s not all you can do to vanquish the seemingly endless reams of foes. An assist move requires your selected legion not to be summoned, but it will appear and often provide a devastating move on anything in your range, whereas if you hit the same button while summoned, the legion will instead attack faster. An assist will cost you points from your soul bar - a kind of legion health bar that replenishes itself as enemies are hit.

The variety of means with which you can dispatch creatures really helps the strategic element of the game, but as mentioned before each objective seems to be one of two types. The first is to annihilate all enemies, which is pretty self explanatory, but the other requires you take out a specific target, imaginatively highlighted with a floating ‘target’. In these cases the other enemies will continuously respawn, which can be a nightmare if you didn’t have a legion to hold them off while you concentrate on the objective.

Standing between you and Delecroix

It's a boss, but fortunately, you've got your Malice legion to protect you.

There are plenty of types of creatures in the game, but they seem to be placed in three types. The first is a standard organic monster that can easily be taken down by Seig, while certain legions are more powerful against them than others. Second comes the metallic monsters that don’t take much damage from you, but some legions work well against them. Finally, later in the game, you’ll come across transparent foes that can only be damaged by your legions.

A roster of quite interesting bosses end most levels and although some are repeated in stronger forms, they do make an interesting change from the standard running from area to area wiping out whatever is thrown at you. Most of the bosses can be defeated by the standard attack pattern learning technique, though thankfully it does take some skill to avoid everything even when you know what’s coming next.

Weighing the balance

Arachnophobes beware a whole load of spiders of varying sizes. Much like my garden shed.

Ultimately, the game is a pretty acceptable action fest, since it follows most of the gaming standards that make a good game, though set against other Capcom hits such as the Devil May Cry series the only unique factor is the legion system. The difficulty seems to be just challenging enough to make it worth continuing, though you can retry any section as many times as you like until you survive. During some parts of the game you’ll notice a more severe ramp in difficulty, but you can then revisit old stages to gain more experience, improve Seig’s stats and find more bonuses than I’d care to count.

I certainly had the incentive to finish the game, partially for the story and partly because I wanted to collect all legions and see what their next level of attack was, but is there enough to keep coming back to after the ten to fifteen hour first play through? Unlocking extras after each completion definitely was a good thing as it allows you to watch all of the movie sequences and check out extras on the vocal theme song (a reasonably appropriate track for the end credits) and while I’m looking forward to trying the entire game as a different character, I can’t help feel that the game was let down by the limited objective system.