by:	July 07, 2005

Fantastic Four is based off of the movie, and also a bit of the Fantastic Four comics published by Marvel Comics. The series is another legacy like X-Men and Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee. The Fantastic Four’s main nemesis is of course Dr. Doom but do come across other villains such as the Moleman and his mole people. Despite being based off of an extremely hyped movie, a fan-favorite comic, and having heavy-hitting voices, the game feels broken, almost as if though they didn’t finish the game before releasing it.

Fantastic Four the game is a pretty good idea when you think about it. You can control the Fantastic Four, switching between them and using them in cooperative play so that you can further your goals. They each have their own unique abilities that are mapped out so that despite having different abilities, when you switch between the four you do not have to remember new combinations. The game is at its heart though basically running around, smashing buttons, and doing the occasional puzzle. The puzzles are not that hard though, and each person in the game has a set of unique abilities and ways to solve puzzles. The first that you really begin to control, Mr. Fantastic, has a super-elastic body that can stretch out to punch enemies, wail on enemies to punch them out with windmill blade arms, kick with a big stretchy foot. Then you have the Human Torch, which floats about the ground at all times and can shoot out fireballs, do devastating fire-pounding attacks, and so on. The Invisible Woman is a character that you can use stealth with by cloaking yourself and going behind an enemy to kill them in one swift move, you can use telekinetic force to knock down enemies, and make force balls. The Thing is a big rocky guy that uses his weight and pure brawn to throw down enemies, and can finish them off in pretty neat ways. The moves for each character are pretty much the same; you have the X and B button to do most of your fighting and the B button to throw. If you do one of your attacks with the right trigger pulled, you will do a power move, which drains your blue “cosmic power” bar, a bar below your green health bar, but it can be easily replenished as it fills up with times, and power orbs that enemies leave behind. You also have a special power for each character that when a yellow bar fills up, when pulling the right trigger and pressing Y at the same time will give you attacks that are extremely devastating and makes you temporarily invincible.

Each character also has special color coordinated moments, were you will see a “4” symbol. Putting the appropriate character over the “4” symbol, the game prompts you to press the B button in which case you either have to press A really fast, twirl the left analog around, or do some other action that doesn’t require a lot of thought to either save lives, stop something from falling over, or solve a puzzle. You can switch between each of the characters with the directional pad, assuming there are at least two of them there; otherwise the AI does a pretty good job of controlling them.

The strange thing is, despite they are supposed to be a team, you might end up just having one at a time, or two. The others just disappear into somewhere with no explanation given. The game also has a combo system, but combos don’t really matter just as long as you beat the crap out of everything around you, you can also upgrade your characters as you go further along, making it even easier to kill the already easily killable enemies. I ended up finding myself using The Thing a lot though, and if he wasn’t able to be used, I would use Mr. Fantastic. It is cool to use Invisible Girl and the Human Torch in some instances, but any of their powerful attacks use up a lot of their power, so you end up having sort of weak characters with them.

Other things that are a bit strange about the game is the fact that there is even a targeting element, that when you lock on to a target it makes the person you are less mobile. You can block in the game also, but most of the attacks you would need to block can be avoided by getting out of the way thanks to the enemies are extremely readable. Besides that, the black button is used as the block button and it becomes sort of annoying. Also many times I would find that enemies would get caught in objects that I would move around, or when rubble would move around, freezing them, but yet I still had to figure out how to get to them to destroy them, otherwise the game wouldn’t push forward. Overall you could probably get through the game in less than ten hours, with very little replay to it, despite there being a co-op mode and an arena mode. The co-op mode lets you have two people total, leaving two additional characters that would still need to be controlled by the AI. Apparently, the developers didn’t get the memo that it would have been a nice little addition if four people could play at once and work together as one unit.

The game’s overall look and feel is the biggest downfall though. The get go of the game, the quality of the CG cut scenes in the game aren’t that great, and it carries on into the in-game graphics. The game is named “Fantastic Four”, not “Visually Torn”, ok I know that was bad. Seriously though, the effects of fire, Invisible Woman’s psychic power balls look worse than GTA III quality graphics. Everything ends up looking choppy, and pieced together in a rush. The Mole Man’s minions are a particularly horrible model that sticks in my mind, especially since they look like a bunch of leafs with green sticks for hands and legs. The sound in the game isn’t all that great either, a lot of the effects end up sounding drowned out, and the voice acting, despite being from the actual actors in the movie might as well have been a rush job in between the actors’ appointments from Leno to Letterman.

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Fantastic Four ends up being a miss in the end with a lackluster presentation and pretty much a button-smashing brawler. I would recommend that after you watch the Fantastic Four movie and you’re still hyped about the movie go ahead and rent the game. Otherwise, unless you are a fan of Fantastic Four this game will leave a stale taste in your mouth, perhaps it is just best to wait for better made comic-book based character games like the upcoming Ultimate Spidey title.

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