X-Men: The Official Game- Activision

So I wrote this little review a while ago... I forget why.

I start this review with a something to keep in mind. I stepped up to the plate with an avid love of the X-Men to begin with. I read the comics when I was younger and continue to enjoy their adventures in game and movie form. So just putting the word “X-Men” on the box made it a pretty good game. Anything else is just icing on the cake. But it hurts me to say that the cake is a little stale.
The game itself is not very interesting to say the least. Almost as if they took Spider-Man: The Official Game, and replaced the main heroes and villains. In other words it mostly plays like any standard comic book hero game. They try to spice things up with some unlockables and some kind of story line, but the game itself should be the star of the show. And unfortunately it falls flat.
The mail selling point of the game was supposed to be the ability to use three different X-Men and to find out why Nightcrawler isn’t present in the third chapter of the movies. The first one somewhat implies that you might be able to choose any of the three characters for any of the levels and do things your way, but that might be too much fun. You simply choose the level you want to play and go with the hero that is was designed for. Wolverine’s levels are all hack and slash anything you see, which is mostly just button mashing until they are dead. Iceman’s levels are “ice sliding” from here to there and freezing this and that, sometimes they time it! Oh what fun! And by far the most entertaining are Nightcrawler’s levels, where you “bamf” around punching people in the back of the head and fixing things. Why? Because they said so!
They do try to throw in some Danger room missions, but those can only be played after going through a number of the campaign levels and aren’t that much more interesting. But if you find all of the little unlockables then you can play the game again! But this time in street clothes! Or classic comic outfits. But the unlocking “sentinel tech” cards and “weapon X” cards are mostly pretty easy to find. From time to time they might be slightly more well hidden than sitting in the corner of the room. But I can’t say the game is all bad, after all they did get most of the cast to do the voice work for the game, with the exception of Miss Hale Berry. But who needs her anyway! And the cut scenes are one of the most enjoyable parts of it. If you can see past the laziness of them being cut outs moving across the screen and enjoy what little story there is to it. And if you have a 360 and are just worried about getting gamer points, then I was a fairly easy 1000 points. When all is said and done I would give it 2 and a half out of 5 stars.