"Good game, although it lacks spirit."

Opening

It's a pretty good game. It's got all the essentials to make it a cool game : A great central character, good action, good gameplay and some un lockable items.

Story

The story, is not the best in the world, but it'll do. You're Wolverine(obviously)and you've been infected with the Shiva Virus that not even your healing factor can defeat. So you've go to go back to the Canadian wilderness to get the cure from the people who made you the Super-soldier killing machine that you are. You can be guaranteed that you'll meet up with other X-men characters as well. It's a very simple story, but again, I found that it lacked spirit.

Gameplay

The game play is really good. There's nothing preventing you from using your powers. You can take out your claws and slice up people, and if you've lost some health, let your mutant healing factor regenerate your health. There's also Strike combos in the game. These are achieved when bad guys are in a certain pattern when you're fighting them. Then when you're able to do a strike, the word Strike appears at the bottom of the screen. Upon pressing the button you get this little scene where Wolverine does some acrobatic moves and cuts the bad guys up. There are 4 strike levels that you can unlock and each with a variety of different moves.

You're also able to use your heightened sense in this game. While using this, the screen goes to this thermal looking background and you're able to see the footprints of others and hear them. You may also sneak up on enemies with your stealth. Stealth is also active in Heightened Senses Mode.

Lastly, once you give or take an amount of hits or damage you go into this Rage mode where you do more damage and are a lot faster.

There's a good bit of action combined with your mutant abilities which makes the game play very fun and easy to pick up on.

The Graphics/Look

The Graphics are good, I'm not complaining there. The Environments have nice level of detail to them.The character models aren't bad either(they could use a tiny bit work though). The look of Wolverine is great, but his face looks like it could have been given a bit more detail. Professor X though(who appears in a few cut scenes) could have used loads more work, but he hardly appears at all, so, I guess that it's not a huge concern that he looks like a deformed egg with wrinkles.

The look of the game overall is great, however, back to that whole spirit thing. It just doesn't have that X-men feeling in there.

The Characters

They're believable in the manner that you know what each character is, and how they react to you and what they can do in terms of their powers. They've got some of the X-men feeling in them, but not as much as you'd expect. As cool as the characters are, they could use a bit more development.

Sound

They've got some good sounds in here. They've also got Mark Hamill(who most of us know as Luke Skywalker) doing the voice of Wolverine, who does a fantastic job. Patrick Stewart also does the voice of Professor X. All the other sounds in the game, like the music and the sounds of the claws and guns shots are all great. There aren't a lot of sounds in the game, but for the ones that they have, they sound perfect to me.

Controls

The Controls are very easy to pick up on and flow well with the action in the game. Not much to say here except that the controls are spot on.

Ending

In conclusion, Wolverine's Revenge is a pretty good game. Now, about that whole spirit thing. Like I said, it's a good game, but it just doesn't feel like an X-men game in most cases. If they were to replace Wolverine with a new game character it would have gave me the same feeling, instead of that awesome X-men feeling.

Don't get me wrong though, I liked the game a lot, but I think that if they were to make a sequel for it they'll need to touch up on a few things and put some spirit in the game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/05/03, Updated 05/05/03