It's quite possible that November 2008 will go down in gaming history as one of the best months ever; four weeks of some of the highest scoring, most innovative, best playing releases that we've seen for a long time. But what of the also rans, what of the games that, through a lack of luck, judgement or both, find themselves competing with behemoths like Gears of War 2, Wrath of the Lich King, Mirror's Edge and Call of Duty: World at War? Should we spare a thought and a few hours from our busy gaming schedules for games like Legendary, games that in any other month would be vying for front page coverage and magazine bylines? Probably not.

Legendary is a first person shooter that's built around the Unreal Engine and very loosely based on the story of Pandora's box. You play Deckard, an art thief who accidentally opens the mythical box and unleashes a variety of legendary beasts on an unwary and unprepared New York city. Branded with a mysterious symbol that grants you special powers, it's your job to get the griffons, werewolves, sprites and fire breathing toads back under lock and key before they destroy the whole world. Now, as set ups go, that's not too bad really; mythical creatures on the rampage in a modern day environment sounds like it could be quite good fun. Don't let this fool you though, because Legendary is a mess, and, more than anything else, a huge disappointment.

You'd think that a game with a setting as iconic as New York city wouldn't have to worry too much about in terms of repetition; that with such a huge canvas within which to play, the developers would be able to create an interesting and varied set of levels to enjoy. What you wouldn't expect is to spend most of the game under the ground, in subway tunnels, sewers or cellars, only rarely glimpsing the scope and scale of the destruction that's taking place in the city above. Sadly, that's exactly what you get in Legendary; dimly lit grey corridors, dimly lit white corridors and dimly lit train tunnels, over and over again - and when you are allowed out into the city night, all you get is the most fleeting of glimpses, before the game forces you back down to another tube station or another tentacle-infested sewer system.

The weaponry you use to blast such betentacled beasties includes a variety of small arms, assault rifles and rocket launchers, your arsenal growing more powerful as the enemies become bigger and stronger enemies. There are no health pick ups or recharging stations as such; instead, the symbol that's branded onto your hand when you open Pandora's Box at the start of the game allows you to absorb "Animus energy", which can be found in the game world, as well as harvested from dead enemies. This energy not only lets you perform a repulsing attack but it can be used to power some machinery, and, most importantly, to can heal you.

The enemies that you face range from gangly, speedy werewolves, to rotund, fire-belching toad creatures. You also have to fight off a secretive black ops agency, on top of invulnerable air sprites, squawking griffons and what looks like the Kraken. In an odd and archaic move, a lot of these enemies are on infinite respawn loops, meaning that no matter how many of them you take down, another group comes along to take their place. To all intents and purposes, you could stay in one room for the entire game, cutting down wave after wave of beasts and never getting anywhere. In these days of Director AI and brilliant game design, not only is this lazy - it's downright unforgivable. Fights quickly become dull and predictable, while tension and pacing are lost and the whole game becomes an exercise in boredom.

The graphics are solid enough, as you'd expect from a game based on Epic's Unreal technology, but it lacks any of the visual intellect of other titles that utilise the same engine, such as BioShock. It's grey walls a go-go and, as grey walls go, they're just fine, but who wants to spend eight hours looking at grey walls? The character models also lack the artistic flair needed to make them into something special; the griffons just look like stretched out chickens, the minotaurs are fat and stumpy and not really that threatening, the werewolves are too thin and typical to be memorable. Some of the voice acting is passable while the rest is poor, verging on the awful. The guns sound meaty and real enough, and the assorted shrieks and calls of the dying populous and the mythological creatures are all reasonably believable. There are moments of laziness and bad design in the sound and visuals though that typify the way that Legendary consistently fails; you hear a crowd shrieking and screaming and head off to investigate, only to find this 'crowd' consists of three people, two of whom have been dead for a long time. By the time you've found them the sound file's run out anyway.

The multiplayer modes are as dull and annoying as the rest of the game but there's at least fun to be in hand in playing as one of the monsters you fight against in the single player campaign. All of the requisite modes are here, such as deathmatch, capture the flag and variations there upon, but none of the maps or modes are good enough to pull this game out of the doldrums. Also, I suspect finding a game on Xbox Live will be incredibly difficult because anyone with any sense at all is playing Gears and CoD.

Legendary had so much potential; it had a great idea at its core, a sturdy engine upon which to build and a console that could have handled almost anything that the developers threw at it. What we've ended up with is a shambles, a game that looks boring and plays badly - a game that feels as ancient as the mythical beasts that you must vanquish. There are the tiniest moments that shine through the dross, where you catch a glimpse at what Legendary could have been, but these moments are so far and few between that it's impossible to recommend it - with so many fantastic new releases that are demanding of your time and money, to spend either here would be a waste. Sadly, this game is Legendary by name but certainly not legendary by nature.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).