"Too much wasted potential..."

You know it was coming…X-men 2 is coming so there had to be a game that HAD to take advantage of the hype surrounding the movie. And since Wolverine’s one of the fan favourites in the Marvel Universe, is there anybody better to base a game on?

Gameplay: Activision have the market cornered with superhero titles…their licensing of the Marvel brand gave them a HUGE boost over the competition (plea to Activision: PLEASE MAKE A GAME BASED ON ONSLAUGHT: MARVEL UNIVERSE!!! PLEASE!). You could have guessed that this one was gonna be in the veins of Spiderman coming from the same publisher and all…

In a sense, it is like Spiderman. You go through the levels, killing baddies and flipping switches. Get to the end of an act and face a boss. Repeat till end of game. Truth me told, there really anything new or outstanding with X2. It’s like the developers wanted to implement something cool (the Animal Sense mode is awesome) and then simply decided that it was too much work. So we get a game as cookie cutter as it can be…The only thing that sets this game apart from other generic 3rd Person games is that it starts Wolverine and a host of Marvel characters, both good and bad. Oh yeah…and Logan’s retractable claws. Who could forget them?

But take away the Marvel dressing and what you get is a pretty lackluster game with a lame combat engine. And I do mean LAME! No ability to manually switch targets in the middle of a fight, very little moves (apart from the awesome STRIKE! Moves) and very, very glitchy in its collision detection…Fighting is a freaking CHORE. So to avoid that you’ll be going through the game sliding EVERY single baddie (sliding into baddies makes them drop their weapons) and then trying to get them to stand in position so you can kill them in one hit (sometimes two) with the STRIKE! attack. That’s how you will proceed through the game, believe me. And when you get hit (INEVITABLE since Logan has absolutely NO dodge moves…not even a single flip) the only feasible way to regain health is to sheath your claws and wait…You could use the Health vials but those are very, very, very RARE! So you’ll spend a lot of your time just staying still in one place and waiting for your health to regenerate. It kills the pace of the game dramatically AND makes it a chore…I mean kill a few baddies…rest. Kill a few more…rest again. BORING!

The only thing that makes this game fun are the stealth kills. It’s pretty fun slinking around and taking out baddies one by one silently but even this part of the game has its flaws. The basic kills are pretty limited, you either snap the bad guy’s next or stab him in the leg to down him and then slash his back continuously. Pretty lame seeing them over and over…Sure there are some special kills (jumping from a high area and stabbing the enemy or smashing the bad guy’s face into consoles) but those are rare and only work in specific areas.

Now lets talk about the combat engine…or the lack of one. Apart from the sliding technique, another effective (yet EXTREMELY) lame way I found to beat all normal enemies is to run up to them and press Kick three times. On the third hit, Logan will stun the enemy and you can do a STRIKE! kill. And I don’t even need to mention the lack of evasive moves…basically you can only punch or kick. No sideways dodging, only an ineffective roll to the side. Logan’s WAY more agile than THIS! And the Rage meter? Please…another good idea gone to waste. What’s the use of having it if it runs out so freaking fast? And why the hell does it activate without my permission? I swear, there is NOTHING more annoying than it activating by itself (when your bar’s full) when you’ve just cleared an area of baddies OR you’re low on health and desperately fighting to stay alive by DELIBERATELY fighting with sheathed claws (Rage makes your claws extend). I did a few times because of the latter reason…isn’t the purpose of the meter to help and not hinder?

The only salvation to the crappy engine is the extremely well done STRIKE! kills. Some of the later ones are like watching poetry in motion. Watching them truly makes you appreciate how awesome a fighter Logan really is…its too bad you can’t do those moves in real combat…The battle system would have been awesome if you could.

For a game that’s so steeped in fighting, you’d expect a whole bunch of foes to kick around, right? Keep on looking buddy…you’ll be spending the majority of your time fighting human soldiers…hell, they even look mostly the same! And their fighting style is the same as well! It’s like you fighting the same enemies through out the whole freaking game…wait a minute…you ARE! Why the made the normal baddies so freaking MUNDANE I don’t know…the X-men have a TON of cool baddies (The Hand, The Phalanx Covenant or even the Brood) but do any of them see game time? NO…instead you get clichéd military types that can’t even die right…

And don’t get me started on some of the level objectives…Sometimes you don’t even know WHAT to do or even what to destroy. What about bosses? Same problem as the level objectives; you get VERY broad hints on what to do. Hell, try and fight the Wendigo, Sabretooth or Juggernaut if you think I’m messing around…unless you figure out what you need to do (HINT: Sneak behind them, whack them a few times and wait till STRIKE! comes out), you’ll be fighting them over and over….FRUSTRATING!

Gameplay: 4.5/10

Graphics: Definitely not one of the best looking game in the PS2 library but it’s bearable. A healthy polygon count for the characters and some nice effects (Animal Sense is the best thing this game has to offer…too bad its underused) round out a pretty solid graphics engine. There’s barely any slowdown (except for a couple of instances when the action gets REALLY hot) and that’s a pretty good achievement considering the silky smooth frame rate the game runs on…Too bad some of the textures look piss poor or repeated too often.

While the character models ARE nicely detailed, I can’t honestly say I liked how they drew them though. Sabretooth and the baddies (except for Omega Red) looked like crap! Yeah, probably artistic interpretation but I don’t a hoot! They look like crap! Logan looks ok but what’s with the face? He looks like he’s suffering from a major case of indigestion!

On the subject of graphic bashing, I’d like to comment on how the developers like so much to base the game in or around military installations. Come on guys, can’t Logan venture into the woods or a town or something? How many military installations do you want the guy to break into? As such after awhile you’ll find yourself saying, “Here we go again…”. Hell I did after finishing level after level in military bases or something similar.

Graphics: 7/10

Sound: The only bright spot in the game…Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the Joker in the Batman animated series, Christopher Blair in the Wing Commander games) as Logan is AWESOME! He puts the right amount of gruffness into his voice that hits the mark just right. Hell, compared to Logan’s voice, Solid Snake is a wuss! Add in Patrick Stewart’s (Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, Prof. X in X-men and X-men 2) commanding voice as Prof. X and you got one hell of a team!

Call me a shallow but one of the fun things I like about the game’s sound is how the claws sound. I love hearing them retract and extend. Yeah, I figure I’m kinda dumb for liking something like this…

Strangely I find the music is really generic BUT (and here’s where the strange part comes in) I LIKE it. Yeah, I’m asking myself why as well! There’s no concrete answer on WHY I like it, I just do. Maybe it something to do with subliminal messaging or something because if I looked at it from another angle, the music is really basic stuff. But somehow it did its job well enough until it got me pumped to kick some butt…

Sound: 7/10

Controls: Here’s a conundrum if there ever is one. First off, I like how the controls are…BUT I don’t like how they’re IMPLEMENTED!

Let me explain…The controls are tight and quite responsive and for a game of this type, that’s a mighty important thing to have. Granted, the jump seems to be a bit floating but since you’re gonna be dishing damage from the ground, its easy to overlook…

BUT how the developers handled to implementation of the controls is a shame! No changing of targets during lock on? What’s with that? How about the severe limiting of abilities when locked on? What about the lack of moves? Come on! Logan was a Spec-Ops guy, a martial artist AND incredibly agile. How come he moves like a normal HUMAN in this game? Where are all the insane berserker moves he SHOULD be able to do? I’m not saying Logan should be able to wall run or something, just that his arsenal of moves should have been more diverse knowing his background…

Controls: 6/10

Replay: Not really much is all I can say and even then that’s probably a stretch. Collecting Dog tags, Comic covers (which unlock costumes) and Cerebro Files (unlock information) and a few other lame bonuses round out the extras. Sure, the alternate costumes rock (I LOVE the Prototype Costume) and the Cerebro files at least give some background to the baddies and heroes for the unenlightened but more extras would have definitely have helped…How about branching storylines? Too bad, as it stands the game’s replay value is very limited…

Replay: 5/10

Summary: It’s not a great game but any lengths but at least it isn’t the worst out there. Maybe since Wolverine’s such a famous guy that expectations for his game are high, I don’t know. But the fact is, overlook the flaws and what you get is still a very playable game. At the very least get it to listen to Stewart’s and Hamill’s AWESOME voice acting…

6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/23/03, Updated 04/23/03