Activision’s X-Men: Legends is part team-based strategy, part role-playing game and part mutant-hero action title. Like a crazy drunk cousin, mutants like their combat, so Activision has poured in a full fifth of harried battles with villainous foes. Punches, kicks, jump attacks and all of the traditional X-Men superpowers will of course be available, but it’s the delivery of that frenzied action that may steal the show.

In many respects, X-Men-Legends plays like Baldur’s Gate; Dark Alliance, with an isometric view and controls that will be immediately familiar to fans of the famous dungeon-crawler. The difference, of course, is that you will be able to use superpowers that even the most powerful D&D mage couldn’t have comprehended.

Storm can fly around and summon weather. Nightcrawler can appear and disappear from enemies’ sight to deliver a smack on the noggin. Wolverine can, well, do what he does best: kick it. Basically, if you’ve read about a power in the comics or seen one in the films, it’s here for your enemy-whooping pleasure.

What would those whoopings be, though, if you couldn’t share them with a fellow mutant? Not much. So before each level, you can assemble a team of four characters from a pool of the game’s 15 playable. Levels start out with players controlling the first character they selected, with the other three controlled by the game’s AI. At any time in the game, though, you can press the corresponding direction on the D-pad to switch to any of the other characters on your team (similar to Brute Force on the Xbox). As a result, if you need a certain skill set, you don’t have to rely on the AI to do it for you.

Nor will you have to rely on your lousy game-playing friend, who can play alongside you in the two-player cooperative mode. Four-player support was originally in the works, but the classic days of Gauntlet and the more-recent Hunter: The Reckoning games showed that trying to keep four people on a shared screen can get frustrating. Speed up, slow down, get attacked by enemies that are just off-screen. It’s not that fun, so you won’t find it in X-Men Legends. Two players can coordinate their moves much more easily.

Teamwork will also be essential to solving the game’s puzzles, primarily because of the differing skill sets and powers. For example, in one area you might face an obstacle that most of your team is unable to cross, be it a cavern or heavily guarded passage. By using the D-pad to select a character who can fly, you can use that mutant to sneak over the impassable area and open another passage that the rest of team can use. Sure, it’s simple as far as puzzle-solving is concerned, but it adds a level of teamwork that would otherwise be missing.

X-Men Legends also adds a role-playing element, allowing you to level up, improve a mutant’s skills and even learn new powers. The new powers, of course, are limited to powers that the mutants might learn in "real life." Cyclops, for example, probably wouldn’t be all that interested in learning to create ice, but you’d better believe he’d look twice at a nice new visor enhancement.

Gamers themselves will look twice, too, since the game is sporting a revised graphical treatment. X-Men Legends is breaking the series’ mold with an art style that has more outlined characters and an almost cel-shaded look. Will it work? Probably, since the game already looks good and, lest we forget, the franchise was born from "cel-shaded" comic books.

X-Men Legends is shaping up quite nicely even at this still-early stage, and if the developers can deliver on the early promise this game holds, X-Men and co-op gaming fans will have a great new title to add to their shelves. Expect more from DailyGame in the weeks and months ahead; we think this little franchise might just be on to something.