X-Men The Official Game is officially a lame action game cash in on the upcoming movie. The lousy movie licensed game genre claims another victim in X-Men The Official Game. Based loosely in between the stories of the second and third films, X-Men is a completely unremarkable beat'em up (with a few boilerplate shooter elements tossed into the mix) that feels just haphazard enough to likely have been rushed through development to get it onto store shelves ahead of the film. It's not that it's entirely broken, mind you, but X-Men's missions are entirely generic and devoid of captivating content, and there are enough annoying little glitches and other obnoxious things prevalent throughout to give the game that thrown together feel.
The X-Men are back! Well a select
few of them, anyway.
www.softhitz.blogspot.com X-Men
seems to follow the basic plot concepts of the X-Men movies, but it centers its
focus around three of the heroes: Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Iceman. Whether
this was a deliberate choice, or a direct response to which of the film's
actors Activision could actually get to reprise their roles for the game (Hugh
Jackman, Alan Cumming, and Shawn Ashmore are indeed in the game), we'll likely
never know, but Nightcrawler's inclusion is specifcally to explain why he's not
in the new movie. For what it's worth, Jackman, Cumming, and Ashmore all do
serviceable jobs voicing the characters, as does Patrick Stewart, who returns
to voice act Professor X. Unfortunately, the remaining cast is mostly made up
of soundalikes, and none of them are particularly good.
By centering on these three
characters and setting up the mission structure as the game does, you're left
with a fairly disjointed sense of where the story is going. For instance, early
on in the game, all three characters go through quick training sequences to get
you familiar with how they work. The next mission is a return to Alkali Lake
(the site of Jean Grey's tragic demise at the end of the second film) to
recapture parts of the Cerebro machine taken by General Stryker. You start off
as Nightcrawler, and are given the option later on to play either as Wolverine
or Nightcrawler for another section. Once you've made your pick, you're stuck
with that character for the duration of his missions during this chapter (which
can go up to around three or four in a row, at times). Only after you've
completed it can you switch over to the other available character. Not to
mention that Iceman just disappears during this whole section and we don't join
up with him until significantly later, in a completely new scenario that's
given next to no plot exposition. It's not that a game of this type has to be
some kind of brilliant work of fiction to succeed, but X-Men tells its story in
such a perplexing and disconcerting way that it's difficult to care much about
what's going on.
Each of the three playable
characters fights a little differently from the other. Wolverine obviously has
his Adamantium claws, as well as a rage ability that gives him some
particularly brutal moves; Nightcrawler can teleport to any area within his
visual range, as well as use his teleporting abilities in combat to pull off
more acrobatic moves and transport himself to a "shadow realm" to
regenerate his health (an ability we're not sure he ever had before this game);
and finally, Iceman perpetually rides on an icy surfboard, flying through the
air while shooting his ice beam and ice projectiles, and inexplicably
regenerating his health (an ability we're positive he didn't have before this
game). The Iceman missions are almost more like rail shooters, since you're
near-constantly in motion, floating about various areas and sometimes
navigating perilous traps and pitfalls and for that matter, the Iceman missions
are probably the most interesting part of the game, if only in comparison to
the utterly dull Nightcrawler and Wolverine segments.
When you're playing as Wolverine
or Nightcrawler, you're beating up a lot of enemies in relatively closed off
environments. Sometimes you need to find a control panel to open a door, and
there are some platforming elements with the Nightcrawler sections (which can
usually be circumvented altogether using his teleport ability), but for the
most part you're just constantly fighting enemies with guns, electric sticks,
electric spears, bazookas, or the occasional mutant power. Plenty of beat'em up
games have managed to suffice with a similar formula, but X-Men's combat is
just boring. There's next to no combo variety to speak of, and it's awfully
easy to just use Wolverine's power attacks or Nightcrawler's teleport attacks
over and over again to break past an enemy's block to simply roll right over
them over and over again. It's not that the fights are easy, exactly. Sometimes
they can actually be a bit frustrating, especially when you're playing as
Wolverine and getting pelted with bullets, and the only thing you can really do
is run right at the guys with the guns. But frustration aside, there's nothing
interesting about the fight sequences to make you want to keep playing. It's
just button mashing of the most banal variety.
Additionally, there are a number
of moments in the game that make you wonder just how much time this game really
spent in development. There are no major show-stopping bugs, but rather a lot
of little glitches that just keep popping up over and over again. Enemies will
sometimes teleport from one side of a level to another instantaneously for no
discernible reason; sometimes you can knock enemies into walls or doorways from
which they cannot escape; scripted appearances of characters will sometimes get
stuck and remain there even when they're clearly supposed to disappear moments
later there are a lot of little things like this. Boss fights also seem very
poorly cobbled together. Most boss fights in the game simply revolve around you
and the boss character running around an enclosed area, hitting each other for
a bit, then running off, hitting each other again, and then running off, and so
on. The bosses just aren't very smart, since you can basically pelt them with
attacks, run to the far side of the environment to recharge a bit, and go back
without them ever really running after you, or at least not very quickly.
www.softhitz.blogspot.com X-Men
manages to deliver a pretty good visual experience, although there's nothing
too special about it. The basic character models and animations are nicely
detailed, as are a few of the environments. There are a couple of cool levels
in particular, such as the power plant at sundown scenario Iceman takes on at
one point, as well as the sequence inside the Dark Cerebro machine from the 2nd
movie. There's also a fair share of rather mundane looking areas in the game,
but generally speaking, it's a pleasant enough game to look at. The most
obnoxious visual aspect of X-Men, however, is its cutscenes, or practical lack
thereof. All the game's story sequences are presented with still frame shots of
comic book versions of the movie characters. You'll see these static characters
awkwardly move across the screen to do various actions, and speak to one
another with no mouth movement whatsoever. It doesn't even look so much like a
comic book as it does the kind of purposely bad animation you'd find on
something like Sealab 2021, but without the purpose. Every once in a while the
game does go whole hog into the comic book style of transition, but it skips by
each panel so fast that you can't read a single line of what's being said. As
if the story weren't confusing enough already.
X-Men beat 'em ups can be great
just look at the old X-Men Arcade Game. If the developers had played that a few
more times, maybe they'd have come up with something better than this trite
junk.
There are five home system
versions of X-Men currently available, with iterations on the Xbox, PlayStation
2, GameCube, PC, and Xbox 360. The first four versions all look comparable to
one another, with the Xbox version perhaps looking the best of the bunch. All
four really do look practically the same, but the PC, GC and PS2 versions suffer
from an erratic frame rate. The Xbox 360 version is actually also comparable to
the other four versions perhaps a little too comparable. To say that on a
standard-definition TV, the 360 version looks pretty close to the Xbox version
would be an understatement. They're practically identical, with only a slightly
more noticeable bit of color depth apparent on the 360 version. Upping to HD
resolution does improve matters, especially in terms of environmental detail,
but it's not such a huge difference as to warrant the $60 price tag (as opposed
to $40 for the other console versions, and $30 for the PC version). Suffice it
to say, the 360 version is pretty much a rip off.
X-Men The Official Game is
ultimately an easily dismissible movie game to toss on the smoldering pile of
other cash in movie games released over the years. Its existence is solely
based on the need to have an X-Men game to coincide with the hype surrounding
the film, and it brings no interesting gameplay, story, visual, or feature
components to the table to make it worth your time. It's all the more
disappointing, considering that as of late, Activision has done well with the
X-Men license with games like the X-Men Legends series. You'd have to go all
the way back to 2002 for something like X-Men Next Dimension to find a
comparably lame use of the X-Men license to X-Men The Official Game, and trust
us when we say that this is not something you ever want to go back to.
SCREEN SHOTS
SCREEN SHOTS
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Processor= 1.0GHz
RAM= 256MB
Video Memory= 64MB
Size= 183 MB
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