X-men: The Official Game
From the Manufacturer
Master the power of the X-Men in this exciting action/adventure game. Obliterate enemies and objects as Wolverine, using your lethal adamantium claws and crushing brute force. As Nightcrawler, scale walls, swing from rafters, and teleport through environments to surprise enemies. Shoot ice bursts and create hailstorms as lightning-fast Iceman. For even more power, utilize fury and adrenaline modes. Become a part of the X-Men movie universe. Embark on a globe-spanning conflict featuring every element of the X-Men universe--from favorite villains to famous locations such as Alkali Lake, plus the voices and likenesses of key actors from the films. Battle fierce enemies and join forces with comrades. Face-o...
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Not always is a game based off a movie bad. There really are some good ones out there. However, there are some that truly are bad and should be avoided. X-Men: The Offical Game is that game. The game overall is pretty poor. The developers didn’t seem to take it seriously. The game is meant to connect The second X-Men movie with the third one. Unfortunately, the game just reeks of bad quality. Perhaps if it had spent more time in development, the game could’ve been good. Instead it’s rather bland.
The game begins with a training mission with each character. This is simply to get you adjusted to the gameplay mechanics. Later on you’ll come to see these training missions are just a waste of time. Playing the game is already simple as can be. Afterwards, you go back to Alkali Lake as Nightcrawler and recover parts of Cerebro. Afterwards you’ll be given a choice between which scenario you want.
Throughout the entire game you’ll only get to play as three characters. Wolverine, Iceman or Nightcrawler. Each of them have their own abilities, and their own scenarios. Once you pick one character, you’re stuck with them until their scenario is over. You won’t really run into the other playable characters a lot, though. Neither are the scenarios very hard or exciting.
X-Men is pretty much a simple beat ‘em up game, with little bits and pieces of story thrown in for good measure. The story isn’t really impressive, though. It’s hard to follow, and the game doesn’t put an emphasis on it. What voice acting there is isn’t so bad. At least the voices that come from the stars of the film. You’ll recognize them instantly. Those who aren’t voiced by celebrities don’t sound all that great. The story also unfolds mostly through storyboards rather than cinematics.
But what emphasis there is on gameplay is simplistic and mediocre. All you’ve got to do is beat people up. You might have to open a door or something, but that’s about it. It isn’t that the game is a beat ‘em up that frustrates me. It’s that there’s nothing more to it than button mashing. And there aren’t a lot of combos to perform either. As I said, it’s simplistic.
Outside of beating up your enemies, you may have to telport as Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler does have a healing ability, and so does Iceman, but I’m quite sure they didn’t have one before. Iceman’s levels are a little more interesting than the others, seeing as how his are constantly moving along. The bulk of the game, however, is simply beating up your enemies. And as I mentioned, there isn’t a whole lot of variety to beating them up.
There are moments when the game can be hard. Well, frustrating actually. The game doesn’t provide a lot of difficulty, but it does provide you with having to charge at your enemies head on to–you guessed it–beat them up. You’ll have to run through bullets to get to most of them, and that can be a little annoying.
Boss fights aren’t really exciting either. Those consist of you performing a simple little dash and hit sort of pattern most of the time. They have predictable patterns and don’t really do a whole lot to get you. Again, this makes the game rather easy.
Where the game really hits a low point are the graphics. There are some glitches that might make you question the graphics. For example, you can knock an enemy into a wall and they’ll get stuck there, unable to get out of it, and unable to damage you. Sometimes enemies will pop up out of no where and there’s no explanation. If these sorts of things only happened once or twice, I wouldn’t mind. But they don’t. They happen numerous times and constantly. I wish I could say the game looks good, but for the XBOX360 it looks rather lame. It’s a bit more colorful than the regular XBOX version, but it looks disturbingly identical in all respects. So if you’ve got the regular XBOX, it really isn’t all that different.
It’s also rather annoying that the character selection is only limited to three characters. There could’ve been more characters than just Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Iceman. They each play a little differently, but they’re the only three characters. That’s rather disappointing.
This is nothing more than a Cash Cow game. It’s nothing but a beat ‘em up game with little variety. If it had spent more time in development, it probably would’ve been a better experience overall. There are better games out there. Ones with a bit more quality than this. I can’t recommend this one. Not at all.
I really enjoyed the last few X-men games and was highly anticipating finally being able to play one on the 360. What a waste of money. While game play graphics are passable, transition, intro and cut scenes are terrible. Heck they aren’t even animated. In fact the cut scenes look like they were developed with Flash and their quality is surpassed by South Park.
In terms of game play, you are restricted to three playable characters and mission based scenarios. Wolverine is straight button mashing hack and slash, Iceman is basic aerial navigation and shot lineup and Nightcrawler plays like the Prince of Persia’s retarded cousin.
Save your money and if you really feel the need to spend some time with an awful video game, go dig up a copy of ET from the Atari 2800 land fill.
I love the X-Men but this game was a big let-down. God forbid you should begin the game in one profile and then come back later to try to play as another. You’re forever doomed as a guest from that point which means you can’t save the game and your gamer score doesn’t benefit. I’m sure there is a way around it but nothing that I find in the manual or on a couple of websites. The action is a little silly and while the artwork is nice-looking I would have liked some better movie scenes than just a few panning pieces of art.
Being able to only play 3 characters is a disappointment too. While I like Nightcrawler and Wolverine I still would have preferred more characters than these two and Iceman. I wouldn’t recommend this game.