Review santipilled 3/5 · Sep 16, 2024
Honestly a really well done game. You can feel the huge amount of passion that went into this as you play it, with everything feeling like real fans of the comics created it. There are some really nice environments for the time, some great music, and a really cool physics engine set up which pairs well with the mutant abilities …
Honestly a really well done game. You can feel the huge amount of passion that went into this as you play it, with everything feeling like real fans of the comics created it. There are some really nice environments for the time, some great music, and a really cool physics engine set up which pairs well with the mutant abilities you can use.
The gameplay, consisting of 4 characters you can control individually, allows for a lot of variability and dynamics to the experience. This along with the quite large cast, allows for a really fun concept, setting up some fun combos, and letting you play as a lot of different members of the X-Men. Overall just a really cool concept that was generally executed well.
Where things begin to fall a little flat for me are with the actual levels, the overall story, and the inconsistent difficulty. The level design here can vary a lot in terms of quality. There are some really cool levels (I really liked the astral plane design), but a lot of them end up just feeling like a maze you get through while defeating more and more enemies. This is obviously expected for a game like this, but there were so many levels after the middle of the game that felt like they just dragged on for no real reason, and ended up making it all feel very stale. I would have preferred shorter levels, or at least more variety in the design, so you aren't just fighting mob enemies for like 30 minutes straight.
The story itself wasn't bad, it felt like a very generic comic story, it just didn't really do much for me. Not much else to say there tbh, though I did really like the sentinel experimentation plot point. I didn't care for all of the X-Mansion interludes either, they often consisted of me running around to find a single character in a corner that would tell me basically nothing. I feel like they could have expanded on that quite a bit to add more lore tidbits and make it feel more real and fleshed out.
The difficulty was a very annoying part of the whole thing. Some levels would be incredibly easy due to being overleveled, just for the next level/boss to have insanely high stats making it so your characters are just dying over and over again. This was exemplified by the final boss that had this really weird puzzle/gimmick which was not obvious at all. That aside, the final boss also just had a huge amount of HP, very strong attacks, would summon like 10 homing rockets that would almost always hit you, and had an attack that would stun you and then hit you really hard. I ended up understanding how to play around all of this, but it just was not a fun time and felt more tedious than anything.
Anyway, I had fun playing this overall and think the team did a great job making a good X-Men game here. As a fan it just felt so cool to play as these characters and see them interact. I'm very excited to play the second installment.
