The PSP has been starved for a substantial action RPG ever since launch. Sure, there was Untold Legends, but that didn’t really hit the spot as far as PSP gamers were concerned. X-men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, the sequel to last year’s multiplatform hit, answers that hunger with a game that is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the version that is debuting on the home consoles. That’s saying quite a bit – it’s amazing, even uncanny, how the developers were able to put all the savory aspects of the console version into a portable game. With that, let’s get to the meat of the review and leave the food references behind.

Gameplay
The story itself is just as hefty as the content put into the game. In this latest iteration, the X-Men face an evil so great that they’ll have to team up with their long time enemies, The Brotherhood of Mutants which is of course led by metal bending super-villain, Magneto. Legends II plays very much like its predecessor. You control a team of four mutants and take on the baddies that are getting in the way of your mission. Some of the battles get pretty hairy, especially at higher difficulty settings and with a poorly chosen team. True to its console brethren, it has highly destructible environments and snazzy particle effects. As optic blasts fire through the level and deadly claws unsheathe, it’s quite satisfying to toss baddies into the walls and objects that crumble and shatter. I also enjoyed how the game gives the player the option to dig deep into the RPG elements of by manually distributing stat points and skills or to leave it up to a press of a button. This time saving feature is especially important in a handheld gaming platform, where you usually don’t have as much time to fiddle with the finer details of a game.



Controls
Legends II controls surprisingly well considering the PSP lacks the extra analog and four buttons of its bigger brother. Special powers and manual camera rotation are left up to key combos, much like in the GameCube version. All of the main functionality can be accessed very quickly and the automatic camera is usually in the right place at the right time. Since the controls are fairly seamless, they allow you to focus more on the game rather than working to control it properly. There are combos that can be pulled off by hitting the standard attack buttons in a certain series. X, X, and O, pulls off a nice uppercut which can in turn be followed up by a heavy double-fisted slam. I found that it was helpful that there were optional in-game training sessions that actually taught these moves.