There was a Little Orbit publisher sale running for about 2 weeks until recently, so I broke down and bought
Young Justice Legacy + the Ultimate Hero Pack dlc. They never seem to discount their games past 50% off, and this was the first time any of the DLC had been discounted. I had been wanting it for a while, so $5 was my buy point. Anyway, I played through it, so here's my review.
To start off, I'm sure you guys know that it's a bad game, but I enjoyed it enough to play through twice (you unlock 1 extra character for finishing the game per difficulty and the character you unlock for hard mode is pretty damn cool). The PC versions options are lacking, all you can choose from are resolution and fullscreen/windowed mode. Vsync is off by default, you'll have to force it. The framerate is capped at 30 fps, but I honestly wasn't bothered by that and I'm usually picky with framerate caps. The graphics very much look like a polished PS2 game, which isn't surprising.. it's a budget TV show adaption.
I was disappointed right off the bat after seeing that the online co-op is completely broken. It'll give you an error when trying to create or search for a lobby. I checked the forum and there didn't seem to be any way around this, but I was willing to play the campaign in singleplayer so this wasn't a deal breaker for me. Ideally, the game is best played in co-op, so if you have the opportunity of doing local co-op, I'd recommend that.
In singleplayer, you'll be constantly switching across the 3 heros you have in your team, so it does take some getting used to. Focusing on playing only one hero isn't very effective, as your power meter will keep running out and the normal melee attacks (that don't consume energy) are
ing terrible and pointless to use most of the time. You'll mostly be spamming power attacks, which is why it's better to use all 3 of the characters on your team.
The tutorial kind of sucks. They teach you most of the core mechanics, but they don't tell you about the squad/hero boost, a semi-important feature, which is only briefly mentioned in a loading screen tip, and doesn't go into detail for how to use it. They expect you to RTFM, but who has time for that?! Actually, there are a few other things that aren't explained in detail. When you open a chest, it will appear that it's empty but it has a tiny XP orb that you can't really see, and I think you get money for smashing boxes, but those also seem to be empty whenever they're destroyed. I don't know if this is a lazy design choice, or if it's a problem attributed to the PC port.
The money that you earn is almost completely useless, because 90% of the items you can buy are shit. Many of the "enhancements" you can buy boost your melee attack power, or your defense. Melee attacks suck, and the game is ridiculously easy even on hard mode that you'll never need extra defense. I ended up using the same 2 items (that increase power damage and energy efficiency) for the entire game. This also means that the hero skills that increase defense or melee strength are useless.
About half of the characters in the game suck, they aren't very balanced. You'll have the option to take whoever you want with you into a mission though, except for the team leader, so it's not a big deal. It does however make the game a bit more boring when you're using the same sets of characters for the whole game once you figure out which heroes are good. The best character in the game IMO is Wondergirl, which is DLC. If you're wondering which heroes are worth using, this is how I rank the best of them: Wondergirl (DLC) > Artemis > Lagoon Boy (DLC) > Miss Martian > Nightwing > everyone else. Rocket's also pretty sweet, but she takes forever to unlock so I didn't rank her. Zatanna is useful as well, but only when her skills are maxed.. which takes too long. DLC characters are unlocked from the start, along with Artemis, so you start out with good characters by default. The good thing is that XP is shared with all of the characters, so you can freely choose who you want without needing to level them exclusively.
So by now, you must be wondering why the hell I would play through it twice. The answer to that is the game is worth playing through if you love Young Justice and want to play as the characters or test out the superpowers. It's NOT worth playing for the story though. It's meant to fill the gap between season 1 and 2, but the story ultimately seemed rushed and uninteresting to me. The plot is nowhere near the same quality of the show, but it is cool to fight against the majority of the villains from the show. If your only interest is the story, I suggest youtubing it. For $5 + $2.49 for the DLC, I got my moneys worth, and more importantly got to take up an entire page with my review.
