Reaction: PSP X-Men Legends 2

I must say I haven't been this taken with a new game in quite some time. I guess a plain old action game was just what the doctor ordered. X-Men for PSP (and available on several other platforms) is a Zelda-like action-RPG. That is, it's mostly a walking around and beat things up, but with a mixture of puzzle-solving and character-customization.

I only started playing last night on the Easy mode (where most options are automated; the AI will equip what it thinks are the most powerful add-ons to your characters). It took me a while to get used to - in the sense that I hadn't played the first game, and secondly, there is very little in the way of in-game documenation. I spent a lot of my first hour or two just experimenting with what buttons did what... But other than that, I started to realize that there was some sort of intuitiveness to the experience even if I didn't necessarily know what every single status icon meant. Particularly annoying, however, is the selection of super-powers your team members have... you only have an icon to go by and in the heat of battle is not the time to be guessing what 4 pink dots together is supposed to signify.

But once you do get the gist of everything walking around throwing punches can be a great stress reliever. For my early missions, I selected my old favourites: Wolverine, Rogue, Cyclops, and Storm... it only took a little while to understand that by looking at certain coloured meters, I could tell when Wolvie would soon be able to unleash one of his special attack moves, or when Cyke could blast away with a choice of optic-blast patterns, etc...

In fact, I just spent the better part of 3 hours sitting in bed with my PSP... bringing my total game time to nearly 8 hours (I spent 2 hours this morning with the PSP while waiting for my automotive work to be done). Yessirrie - I think we have a winner.