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.
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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.
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.
System Requirements
processor:1GHz
ram :512Mb
processor:1GHz
ram :512Mb
graphics card :256Mb
keyboard, mouse, others.
keyboard, mouse, others.
Downloading Instruction
Game Size : 184 Mb
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