Young Justice: Legacy Review - The Unremarkables
The younger DC heroes have occasionally had the spotlight with shows like Teen Titans and Young Justice, and Young Justice: Legacy is a spin-off game based on the latter, with an original story. It’s a fairly simple action-RPG with voice acting that’ll be familiar to fans of the show, and characters that will be familiar to anyone who knows anything about the DC Universe. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?
The problem with Young Justice: Legacy is the same problem that plagues so many titles that are licensed children’s TV shows. It seems the developers are content with putting out a slightly lackluster product, as children are less likely to complain about it.
A storyline based between Season 1 and Season 2 of the show drives Young Justice: Legacy, and it’s been written in collaboration with the writers of the TV series, ensuring the storyline is canon and won’t deviate too much from what fans expect.
The Young Justice HQ is the base of operations, and it is from here that you will be selecting missions and spending experience on upgrading your characters. The small flaws begin to show up almost immediately. Upgrading your character’s moves and abilities with points brings up a 3D model of the character in question, which isn’t really noteworthy or out of the ordinary at all. The problem here, is that the game actually brings up a very short loading screen when switching between the characters. One, single 3D character model requires a loading screen, and this isn’t the 3DS or Vita, this is a full home-console release.
I have honestly never encountered a loading screen for such a small thing before, and when I saw it happen before my eyes, it genuinely took me aback, and small issues like this are prevalent throughout the game. None of them game-ruining, but all of them make the game feel like it is barely out of Alpha stages, let alone Beta.
The only saving grace is a good range of playable characters, each with their own abilities and moves, but even these are somewhat disappointing, as the character you choose won’t change how you play the game, and the animations when using the unique attacks all look very jagged and rough. A shame, no doubt.
Levels are given the same amount of polish, or should I say lack thereof. All the stages are fairly linear, with the odd path diverging from your target indicating there’s an item “hidden” there. Think Final Fantasy XIII, only considerably more basic. This game was originally developed for Wii and Wii U, and you can tell. This is not the amount of detail you expect from a game released on a HD console. Environments are very basic and the camera angle is fixed awkwardly, things that are just not expected of a game in this age.
Graphically, everything looks just too simple and plain. As I mentioned, this was originally a Wii game, and it is all too clear throughout, sadly. Colours look washed out more often than not, character and environment models are very simple and unimpressive.
All character voices are done by the voice actors from the show, adding a much needed touch of authenticity. Cutscenes are all fine, as a direct result, but voices are rarely heard whilst actually playing through stages. Other bits of audio, such as sound effects and backing music, are all perfectly functional, but none are impressive or special in any way.
