by:	June 20, 2006

I am admittedly a huge X-Men fan. Ever since I was a child, I have been watching following the franchise with every avenue Marvel takes everyone’s favorite mutants – from comics to television shows, from toys to video games, I have been there for every X-Men experience there is. With X-Men: The Official Game, I had become overly hyped for the game and the movie. The first two movies were incredible in terms of their translation to the big screen so my anticipation for the third and final chapter was raised quite high. Let’s detail you on how everything turned out.

To start things off, I ventured to the local movie theatre to watch X-Men: The Last Stand (X3) with my girlfriend. After easily the shortest movie of the three that have been made, I left the theatre with tons of depressing notions. First off, why did they let Brett Ratner even join onto the project with his work usually revolving around comedies and movies already based on established franchises. He isn’t the most technical director nor is he going to win the most popular award either. The next question that arose was why did they make it such a short movie with not too much time spent on developing any of the new characters like Juggernaut or Angel? There are so many questions that I wanted to be answered and when my copy of the official game showed up, I crossed my fingers that all the holes in the stories would be fixed.

X-Men: The Official game is developed by Z-Axis whom is responsible for Aggressive Inline. While in the past Z-Axis had tons of polish added to their previous outings, X-Men lacks any of that with the feeling of it being rushed to meet the movie’s theatrical release. The level design is simple, the lengths of the missions are short, the cut scenes are collages and meshes of character art, and just about everything about this game feels wrong.

Z-Axis allows players to gain control over three mutants: Wolverine, Iceman and Nightcrawler. Of the three, my favorite ended up being Nightcrawler even though it seemed to be limited in what this teleporting fiend could actually do. Each of the three mutants plays different from one another. Wolverine is the brawler who scraps with enemies left and right. Straight to the point, his portion of the game is a beat-em-up. Out of the three, Wolverine’s was the least intriguing. Iceman is pitted to ice sliding around levels putting fires out and fighting in the air for the majority. While Iceman was a joy at times, he is also limited just like Nightcrawler. Iceman is noted to being one of the most powerful mutants in the comics and he isn’t anywhere’s close to being as powerful as he was in the movies either.

Using all three is nice, but, none of them are interesting enough to buy the game alone. Wolverine isn’t as tough or violent as he was in his own game back in 2003, Wolverine’s Revenge. Iceman just flies around the levels with limited action. Nightcrawler has the opportunity to really light up the opposition, but, never reaches that point of skill. Their combos are short and only have about 3-5 attacks depending on who you are using. The game becomes repetitive within the first hour of play time.

The enemy A.I. is even worse off. They all have the same basic attack which doesn’t add any type of suspense or entertainment when fighting them. Even at the higher difficulties, they tend to be on the easier side of things with just being in the way to your mission objectives. In a few Wolverine missions, I just ran around them since they continually fire their guns without ever reloading. They are a distraction for the real point of the game, and that is to advance the story from X2 to X3. X-Men: The Official Game is a prequel to X3, so it does have somewhat of a purpose.

X-Men: The Official Game turns out to be three big mini-games rather than one fleshed out single-player game. No multiplayer is open to friends to join in, the replay value is only found in beating it on harder difficulty levels to gain more achievement points, and just about everything about this game feels wrong in every way. I can’t recommend buying this even if you are a fan of the franchise.

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There’s nothing here that warrants a buy. Fans that want to know why Nightcrawler wasn’t in the movie will want to check out the game from your local video rental store. Nothing more than a weekend rental.

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