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Galaga Legions Review

by Chris Holmes August 24th 2008 5:06 PM CDT2 Comments

When I was a kid, games were difficult. I couldn’t complete them, and I kept on hitting brick walls in my own personal skill. But as I have grown older, I class myself as a gamer that can beat anything. Games have either got easier or I have got better, and mostly, it’s the former. However, it seems that some games still try to torture and destroy their players, and Galaga Legions is one of those games.

Xbox Live Arcade has been a bizarre hub of retro arcade games. Most of them have been atrocious conversions, shoehorned to fit the 360 in order to score profit. However, it seems that Namco-Bandai has learnt the errors of its ways, with the studio starting to reinvent Arcade classics. Pac-Man Championship Edition was the first title of theirs to do it, and it brought in new and enjoyable gameplay elements and fancy neon graphics.


Galaga Legions follows the Pac-Man Championship Edition template, coming back with new gameplay additions, and a full graphical overhaul. For those of you who do not know what Galaga is all about, it’s essentially a classic top-down shooter, where you control a spaceship flying through space shooting waves upon waves of enemies.  In the original, you had a small weedy gun on the front of your ship and could only shoot enemies upwards as they made their way around the screen odd patterns.

However, in this remake, your weapons are much more powerful, and you can take on a huge number of enemies without feeling outgunned. Furthermore, you can now place small breakaway turrets (called satellites) from your ship on the playing field, trapping enemy galagas in a vortex of gun fire to bring them down. Another interesting new addition is the ability to fire at an enemy ship leader to blow up its little followers, a technique that really helps when the screen gets completely filled with the mad little blighters, which is about less than a minute into the first area.

The new stuff doesn’t stop there though, as now there are on-screen indicators which show where an enemy will spawn and the path they are going to take once they emerge. Obviously, this really helps with developing a strategy and to get a rhythm going, and is also integral to learning the five areas available.

Going back to the difficulty, this game is so hard it could be used as an interrogation device for getting secrets out of annoyingly quiet squares during wars. Waves of enemies come onscreen at all angles, making it very intense and vicious, with you having to manoeuvre your craft and satellites constantly in order to stay alive. There are slight pauses in the action and strange words of warning, but normally the chaos is pretty non-stop. Do not apply if you are weaksauce or scared of being made to play as the weakest element in a game.


Legions is the type of game that you get better at every single day, as the various techniques and spawning areas become soaked in by your subconscious, and despite the difficulty stopping you in your tracks a lot, it doesn’t really frustrate you as much as it could, and this is due to some great design elements by Namco-Bandai. There are a few retro-based graphical styles for the ships, a pumping electronic soundtrack, and truly wonderful neon-filled visual effects.

However, the game is not without its faults. Aside from the intense difficulty, the gameplay doesn’t do much to make you change the way you play, and you feel like the game is always against you, spawning you in the middle of enemy gunfire after dying, for example. Moreover, you can’t easily tell the difference between foreground and background fire, which gets annoying when there’s roughly a hundred enemies all breathing down your neck and leaving you with little room to dodge. Also, there just isn’t enough things to do, with only adventure and championship modes that feature the same five areas, with your progress being tracked on a few basic leaderboards.

Overall, Galaga Legions is worth its asking price if you are willing to put up with the torture. After the initial awkwardness, it gets incredibly fun, pushing your skills right to their very edge and making you question how good you really are. It’s a game where mind triumphs over matter, with your own personal mental momentum carrying you across the game more so than your pinpoint control over a gamepad. Despite the complete lack of hype for it, Legions is a lovely little title that fans of the rejuvenated top-down shooting genre will enjoy, while other players can just look at the pretty lights.