Wolverine (1991)

Beat. This was a fairly standard 2D platformer with pretty good platforming and bad combat. Wolverine controlled quite well in the air with ability to adjust position in mid air, which is the only acceptable way to program jumping. Some jumps were too long and required pixel perfect timing though, which I hate, especially when instant death was below. The combat sucked because attacking locked him in place and enemies did contact damage, neither of which worked well with melee combat. At least some enemies stood still or had predictable range of movement. It was actually easier to fight with jump attacks because then his position was not locked. Claws could be used for extra damage but cost health with each swing, and there was no passive health regen, like Wolverine SHOULD have. Instead he picked up burgers and wine to heal. There was a berserk meter that filled up by killing enemies and went down by taking hits. When full it gave him Mario star style invincibility and killing enemies on touch, but it also made him randomly attack. I made great use of berserk by constantly jumping so he spent minimal time attacking air and maximum time progressing through the level. There was a bit of tactical trade off between killing the limited enemies (they did not respawn) vs risking damage, and when to trigger berserk. I generally found the game not too difficult with plenty of health, though I did save state scum and lower the speed to 30 frames. The biggest problem was instant death platforming. The 2 bosses were at the end. Magneto was easy once I realized it was about destroying the energy barrier to get to him rather than some kind of smack his attacks back to him. You would think that Magneto would hard counter Wolverine, given how much metal is inside him. Then was Sabertooth, who was easy to hit with jump attacks. However after some time I took a look around and seen the cliff on the right side. I bet I have to knock him off that, and that was a huge pain in the ass because of how often he jumped forward and absolutely refused to chase me over there. Why wasn't Wolverine also unkillable in standard combat? Apparently there were hidden powerups from the other mutants, including a health restore by giving Logan a break from combat to allow him to regenerate. But that's not how his healing works. I did not find any of those.

Overall this was a decent platformer with good stage design brought down by the poor combat. He should have been using claws all the time and been able to move while attacking. Granted it would be difficult to properly implement his healing powers without making him overpowered.

5.8/10