This has nothing to do with the classic Galaga and is an average remake, at best.
Oops.
What have they done to the Galaga I know and love?!! They have replaced it with some wanna-be 'Geometry Wars' shoot-em-up game that is a disgrace to the original. This game does not look, feel, or play like the original in any way. Now it's not like I wanted them just to update the graphics of the old game and just slap a $10 price tag on it, but I certainly didn't want them to make some generic, super-hard, psychadelic version of my classic favorite.
While some people will praise Namco for making Galaga Legions much more challenging, I am NOT one of those people. It's not even the insane difficulty level that bothers me, but it's the fact that this does not feel like Galaga at all. At least the Pac-Man remake FELT like it was a Pac-Man game. This feels like the developers were playing a lot of Geometry Wars over the past couple years and decided to mesh Galaga with it. The result, in my opinion, is a disgrace. If you are going to remake a game, you have to at least keep the feel of the original. This game has none of that.
Now if you are coming into this game with no previous knowledge of the original game or never played it, then you might find this more enjoyable than I did. It's brutally difficult (harder than Ikaruga, in my opinion), it looks nice technically (even though I am not high on the psychadelic look), and employs a new gameplay tweak: you now control two little ships that can attach and leave your ship.
While this sounds great, in theory, it didn't add much to the game for me and was more annoying than anything else. The game is so fast paced and hectic that it's hard to waste precious seconds trying to figure out where to put your little ships and what direction they should aim in. Sure the game flashes where enemies will be entering the screen from about a sec. before they show up, but it's so quick it's really hard to react that fast. On top of that, the game becomes all about memorizing where enemies are going to be coming from after playing a level about 10-20 times. I can't stand when games do that and they could have eased off the difficulty a bit and made this game much more enjoyable.
'Galaga Legions' sounded great, in theory. Unfortunately for me (and my wallet), the actual execution somehow got lost along the way. If you are planning on downloading this to relive your youth by playing an update of a classic game, don't bother. This game has nothing to do with the original 'Galaga' and it's an insult to the original classic that Namco has placed the word 'Galaga' in the title of this game. If you are into insanely hard, generic shoot-'em-ups that try to rip off the look of the Geometry Wars game.....well, then you are in luck. Namco would like to relieve you of your $10 and give you what you want.