X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fun goretastic romp through the comic book universe and is quite an enjoyable game, but has a few problems with bugs and has quite a few limitations and shortfalls.
Gameplay-wise, the controls are a bit sloppy and you don't really need to know anything other than how to button-mash. Getting creative rewards you with more rage (think of it as a special move meter) and stringing kills together fast enough will eventually reward you with more experience, allowing you to level up faster. However, if you really want to enjoy the full game experience, there is a large array of moves to slice and dice your hapless opponents. I wouldn't be fulfilling my job as a biased, somewhat dickish reviewer if I didn't mention the platforming / puzzle bits of the game. Expect to be jumping around a fair bit of the time along with climbing up and down ropes, hazarding happy-go-lucky jumps, and attempting to beat timed jumping sections. Some of the puzzles really got me frustrated from seeming impossible, then, once I finally got it, I facepalmed. Then again, I'm practically a certified idiot, so I guess that shouldn't surprise anyone.
Combat deserves its own paragraph. Combat in this game is fast-paced, brutal, and blood-tastic. Seriously, the game makes an Eli Roth film look conservative. Wolverine is typically covered in blood from his own wounds, and I've had the equivalent of a meat-covered skeleton running through the halls from the amount of damage sustained. One interesting feature if only for distraction value is watching the wounds slowly close up, which is a fun little activity, especially after a particularly damaging fight. Speaking of the fighting (LOL SEGUEWAY)…
Fighting some of the battles in this game is…frustrating, at best. Some levels are designed with areas to go to and take a breather while your health regenerates, but some areas do not, and so you're left being cheap-shotted by enemies who have attacks that somehow break through both your Adamantium-coated claws and rather substantial musculature. Boss fights are a particular offender in this case. The final boss, Deadpool, is the worst, who magically teleports away from you and fires a laser from his eyes that is unblockable (even with an object such as a taco) and insta-hits. This shoop-da-wooping is extremely annoying, especially when the game glitches, Deadpool gets knocked off of the side, and magically appears directly across from you, blows away a section of the thingy you're fighting on, sending you to your doom. Almost all of the boss fights involve cheap fighting tactics by the game, so I advise you fight as fast, dirty, and damaging as possible, even if it involves not letting your opponent get back up, because they'll do the same thing to you.
Sound-wise I have to say I wasn't impressed by the music. The music is…okay. It's not fantastic, it's not horrible, it just is. The voice cast for the main characters are masterfully done, with Hugh Jackman playing as everyone's favorite anti-hero superhero. No complaints in the main character department, but some of the lines espoused during Wolverine and his boss fights get tiresome, and a lot of your soon-to-be puréed enemies have the same sound bytes, but honestly that's a small problem that you probably won't notice laughing with maniacal glee as you blender your way through level after level.
Graphics aren't shabby, and the level of detail on some of the things borderlines on perfectionist OCD. The mass-produced soldiers probably could have used a bit of work, but blood ribbons around and the blood decals on the ground look fantastic, but being the psychopathic I am, more on the ground would have been appreciated (especially when I, y'know, take someone's arm off). Most of the robots are somewhat imaginatively designed (specifically the predator bots and the big huge robot) and the guys with the electronic-robo-arms are fun to toy with.
Mutagens are fun little additions to the game, making Wolverine even deadlier than the standard model, something that I thought was awesome, as the fully upgraded Wolverine is something that's stupidly powerful and a thing of power at your fingertips. There are several Wolverine action figures scattered throughout the game as well which will unlock a challenge. Beat the challenge, and you get a new costume! The ability to get Wolverine in different costumes is a fun addition for the hardcore comic book enthusiast but superhero costumes aren't really my thing, I'll stick to Wolverine's street clothes.
Alas, I did mention this game has its faults, and there are plenty. Some are harmless little glitches that you can chuckle to yourself with, but others are of the rage inducing "I broke the goddamn controller in half" glitches. Three of my biggest gripes are as follows.
- Characters disappear. This happened to me on no less than three or four occasions. The first time was when Gambit disappeared during the fight outside on the casino side. Gambit just poofed out of existence. Maybe he went with the letter that fell. Regardless, he disappeared. The second time was when Wolverine was fighting Deadpool, and Wolverine was nowhere to be found. The game automatically counted it as a fail and rebooted the boss fight, but the checkpoint system is very merciful and reloaded the game and everything was hunky-dory. The third time was a short time afterward, both Deadpool and Wolverine fell over the side of the tower and obviously fell into a stygian abyss as it auto-failed again. The fourth time was when Deadpool fell over the side, magically reappeared on the polar opposite side of the tower, and proceeded to use his death-ray on the area I was standing on.
- Laggy cutscenes. The CG rendered cutscenes played fine for me, and they were awesomely goretastic with enough blood to shame a slaughterhouse. However, the in-engine cutscenes were horribly slow, and they'd play fine for a few seconds, stutter, then load again. Sorry, if I wanted jerky animation with laggy sound I'd visit Youtube with a 56k connection. The disc even says "streaming" which to me seemed rather shitty. I got the initial run of Xbox 360s, I don't have the hard drive space required to install the entire game, and I don't feel like paying an arm, a leg, and signing a contract in my own blood to give away my first-born to get the super-huge hard drive, not to mention all the time involved with migrating my files over to the new one.
- Appearances are not what they seem. The areas you visit are, at times, wide open, and are begging to be explored. Only you can't. Some giant invisible wall is blocking the areas where you'd LIKE to go, but game designers apparently love fucking with people's expectations and put in a wall to make you unable to climb on rocks rather than put up a wall on the final boss fight to keep you from plummeting to your death (which is odd considering Wolverine is nearly invincible and survived a hell of a lot worse than a simple fall).
Wolverine, for all of its faults and rather short story mode, is a blast to play. Assuming Ravensoft releases a patch for some of the major glitches (hint: they won't), I will gladly revise this review. Until then, X-Men Origins: Wolverine will have to make due with a respectable solid B.
Sticky's Final Grade: B
+ Violent
+ Fun!
+ Plentiful checkpoints
+/- (somewhat) Replayable
+ Lots of hidden things for you to find
- Some enemies are retardedly difficult
- Cheap-tactic boss fights
- Linear when it shouldn't be, wide open when it shouldn't be
? How does a spiked wall or punji stake kill Wolverine but when absorbing several AK-47/M-16/Shotgun rounds he's still able to dish out a beatdown?
No comments:
Post a Comment