X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is a co-operative action RPG from Raven Software, following up on the successful first entry from 2004. The player assembles a four-member team from an extensive roster of mutants — Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Storm, Gambit, Rogue, and many others — and works through a continuous story in real time that, for the first time in the series, teams the X-Men up with their long-time rival Magneto against a common threat: the ancient mutant Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen. The gameplay is built on hack-and-slash combat, a classic RPG system of experience and skills for each character, and the ability to switch between team members at any time and combine their abilities into shared elemental combos, one of the main new features compared to the first entry.

The game supports co-op play for up to four players on a single screen and offers dozens of hours of content including side missions and collectible comic-book pages that unlock bonus material and artwork. The series also includes the Danger Room training mode for trying out characters outside the main story and progressively unlockable alternate comic-book costumes for individual heroes, complemented by scalable difficulty for both casual and hardcore players.

The GameCube version was released alongside the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC releases and does not differ from them in content — the complete campaign, all unlockable characters, and four-player split-screen co-op are all retained. The only practically noticeable difference was the use of lower-capacity GameCube discs, which in reviews led to slightly shorter install and loading pauses than the DVD versions, but without any impact on graphical quality, which matched a level of console performance comparable to the PlayStation 2.

The experience gained from developing both X-Men Legends games later served Raven Software in creating the genre successor Marvel: Ultimate Alliance in 2006, which expanded the roster of playable heroes to the entire Marvel comic-book universe on a similar gameplay foundation. The GameCube version thus remained the series' last stop on a Nintendo console before subsequent entries moved exclusively to PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms.

Why play it: For fans of co-operative action RPGs and Marvel history, it's the last and also one of the most elaborate entries of the series on a Nintendo console, before Ultimate Alliance took over the baton.