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Chaos Legion
game: Chaos Legion
three star
publisher: Capcom
date posted: 12:00 AM Wed Oct 1st, 2003
last revision: 12:00 AM Wed Oct 1st, 2003

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By Eric Qualls

Chaos Legion is mind numbingly boring. It seems that such a statement should be impossible to associate with a game that regularly throws dozens of enemies at you at any given time, but no other word describes Chaos Legion quite as well as boring?. The problem is that Chaos Legion doesn't offer you enough variety when dispatching those enemies so the game becomes very repetitive within the first couple of levels. The bland graphics and limited number of enemy types only further the feeling of repetitiveness. Chaos Legion is pure rental material and nothing more.

The story in Chaos Legion follows Sieg Warheit, a young man that has the ability to summon monsters called legions to help him in battle. Sieg's mission is to stop a man named Victor Delacroix from collecting three artifacts that, when combined, would merge the spiritual plane with the real world. The game is only five hours long, though, and that just isn't enough time for the characters and story to develop into anything you can really care about. 

The gameplay in Chaos Legion is sort of like a combination of Devil May Cry and Dynasty Warriors. You are hacking (and shooting, later on) your way though dozens and dozens of enemies, but Chaos Legion lacks the depth of DMC or DW. The sword strikes Sieg uses are limited to a handful of slashes that were obviously taken out of Dante's playbook. With each legion you equip, you get a couple of new sword moves. Truth be told, though, there just isn't enough variety overall in the combat. The gameplay is nothing more than slamming the Square button repeatedly and watching the same animations over and over again. Late in the game you can control a female character that packs double pistols and uses them in the same flashy way as Dante, but the targeting is so horrible that even though you can do flips and spins and all sorts of special attacks, the only way you can hit anything is by standing perfectly still.

Of course, controlling Sieg and his female counterpart Arcia is only half of the game. The majority of the damage you inflict on the enemy hordes is done by the legions you have at your control. There are seven different legions you can use, each one having different special attacks. You can only equip two at a time, though, so choosing which legions you take into battle with you is important. At least, that is how it could have been had the game been structured differently. There are only a handful of different enemy types, so you only really need to make use of two of the seven legions to beat the game. You can't just let your legions do all of the work, though, and attacks you make on the enemy refill the legions life bar. You can have several monsters on the battlefield helping you (it wouldn't be a legion if you only had one) and it is actually pretty impressive to see them beating the crap out of the enemies. As you fight through a level you collect items and your legions build up experience points that you can use between levels to power them up. These RPG-ish elements are pretty cool, but like I said, you only really have to use two of the legions to beat the game so the experience points are best spent on just those two.

So now that you know the offense you can create, let me describe a typical level. You start a new level and there are, literally, dozens of enemies all coming at you. Luckily, they are stupid and are easy to beat. You can call on one of your legions and they'll get rid of the enemies very quickly. Each level is broken up into smaller scenes which only last a couple of minutes, so once you mop up the enemies the scene ends and a new passage you have to follow opens up and you have another 60 enemies to kill. Sound repetitive? It is. In some areas, there are target enemies that you have to kill, but when you kill those specific enemies all of the others are destroyed as well. In effect, you can ignore 90% of the enemies in the game. It is probably best that the fighting you have to do is kept at a minimum this way, seeing as how the actual combat is so lame and repetitive. 

The graphics in Chaos Legion were sacrificed in order to have so many enemies on screen at once and still maintain a framerate of 60 fps. While Sieg and Arcia look pretty good, the enemies are all very simple and not very detailed. The environments are similarly dumbed down. The same textures are repeated throughout the game, and it is nearly impossible to tell one level apart from another. A thick layer of fog hides everything beyond a 100-meter circle of your character and it just makes the game look even worse as enemies and background objects suddenly pop out from the fog. The sound in Chaos Legion is similarly lackluster. The sound effects are the same hack and slash, grunt and groan sounds you hear in every game and the music is just as bland.

Overall, Chaos Legion is yet another game with a cool concept that stumbles due to poor execution. The first couple of levels are really fun as you hack your way though the seemingly endless sea of enemies. By the third level, though, you realize that you are in the exact same environment making the exact same attacks against exactly the same enemies that you had fought in the first two levels. Some variety in your weapons and attacks or not having to rely so much on your legions would have made Chaos Legion a lot more fun. Die-hard fans of Devil May Cry or gamers looking for a weekend of hack and slash action will have a great time giving Chaos Legion a rent. I do not recommend that anyone purchase it until the price goes down because Chaos Legion is a short, repetitive, boring game that simply isn't worth $50.