Chaos Legion is another mediocre effort in the 3D action genre, and a surprising one in that it follows the typical American game development formula of Game A + Game B = Game C. In this case, Devil May Cry + Dynasty Warriors = Chaos Legion, except without the captivating gameplay mechanics of DMC or DW. This game is the epitome of mindless hack-and-slash action, and I was quite literally bored with it within minutes. Technique and strategy are almost nonexistent; the graphics are dull and dreary; the storyline is both confusing and lame. Combat-centric game design has come an incredibly long way in recent years, but Chaos Legion ignores all of those advances, thinking that throwing a few dozen enemies onscreen at once is impressive enough to make up for gameplay in which you spend the considerable majority of your time hammering the "square" button. It's not.

The gimmick of Chaos Legion is the collection of monstrous sidekicks -- the legions of the title -- that accompany you into battle, and which you power up over the course of the game with the experience points and items earned by slaying foes. While there are seven legions from which to choose, each one effective against certain types of enemies (metallic or organic), there's no real strategic significance involved in your choice; whether you take the same two legions into every level or spread your love evenly amongst them all, you can button-mash through the game (which has no replay incentive) in a day. You'll see almost every type of enemy and boss in the game after the first half-dozen levels, so there's not even the "incentive" of eye candy to spur you forward.

Another fundamental design flaw is that in many sections of each level, you can entirely avoid lesser enemies and terminate a handful of "target" enemies, which automatically destroys everything else on the screen. (You could argue that this isn't a flaw, since it allows you to beat the game and move on with your life that much faster, but now you're just being catty.) Why shape a 3D engine to allow for dozens of monsters onscreen at once, and then shape the game design so that it benefits the player to avoid them all?

Chaos Legion copies Capcom's own Devil May Cry in several ways -- the protagonist's sword-swinging combos, for example -- but most blatantly in the level where you control a female character armed with a pair of pistols that she wields very much in the flashy style of DMC's Dante. Alas, the auto-aiming is so broken that the only way for her to consistently hit enemies is by standing still. DMC rewarded the player for stylish kills; Chaos Legion punishes the player for attempting the same.

Chaos Legion maintains its 60 frames-per-second gameplay speed (and kudos for that, if nothing else) with the same visual tradeoffs as Dynasty Warriors, using a thick layer of fog, simplistic background terrain, and low-polygon enemies to lessen the Emotion Engine's load. DW manages to achieve solid and occasionally beautiful level design despite its self-imposed limitations, however, whereas Chaos Legion presents the player with a seemingly endless procession of featureless castle courtyards and heavily reused gray and brown textures. The voice acting is, as with all Capcom games, mediocre at best -- will the company ever decide to spring for genuine thespians, I wonder? -- and the rock soundtrack is equally bland.

Causing chaos and mayhem!
One particularly bizarre aspect of Chaos Legion is that it gives you a statistical summary not just at the end of each level, but after each "scene" within a level, as if this somehow makes the preceding two minutes of button-mashing action any more interesting. There's also a very amusing moment in which the game prompts the player to lower the difficulty level from normal to easy, so he can "enjoy the story." Dynasty Warriors 2/3/XL/4 have great stories and characters, but those are derived from one of the best historical novels ever written; Chaos Legion's trite tale and cast of ciphers would get you flunked out of a junior-college screenwriting class.

Chaos Legion is repetitive, ugly, short, nonsensical, and boring -- a beat-'em-up that gets almost everything wrong, and that's wildly overpriced at $50. (Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick provides superior hack-and-slash action for $20.) I'm confident that Capcom will pull out of its slump before much longer, but mediocre action games like Chaos Legion won't help its cause.