( 6 reviews )
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 5 2008
X-Men III: The Official Game is disastrous. This game is very repetitive, very boring, very generic, and crappily designed. To start off I'll give you a list of licensed games you should go play instead of this piece of crap: 1. X-Men Legends I and II 2. Marvel: Ulitmate Alliance 3. Over the Hedge 4. King Kong 5. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay 6. Spider-Man (Any game) 7. Goldeneye 007 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Xbox) 9. Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb 10. Aladdin (SNES, Genesis) 11. Hulk: Ultimate Destruction 12. Kingdom Hearts I and II 13. Superman: Shadow of Akopolis 14. Ghostbusters: The Game 15. Lego Star Wars 16. Batman: Arkham Asylum 17. The Incredibles 18. Cars 19. Ratatouille (Xbox 360 version only) 20. Celebrity Deathmatch 21. The Thing 22. Constantine 23. The Warriors 24. Scarface: The World is Yours 25. The Matrix There, now go play those good licensed games instead of wasting your time playing this cesspool of failure. Now, let's to go to the review. WHAT THE GAME IS: Another crappy licensed product that is very generic and very boring. The X-Men are dealing with their history and are trying to stop an evil corporation from releasing dangerous technology upon the world. Unfortunately, the story is confusing and poorly conveyed throughout the game. GRAPHICS: This game came out in 2006 and looks ugly like a game from '03 or '04. The cutscenes at least have a nice comic-book style. This game is ugly most of the time, sometimes the the special effects look good. MUSIC: Most of the time there is very little present. And when it's there, it's awful and not worth listening to at all. SOUND: Lots of punching, lots of shooting, lots of screaming from dying enemies, voices of annoying enemies, some actors from the movie and more. GAMEPLAY: This is the worst part of the whole experience, with very generic and uninspired moments that are on par with things you thought (or at least hoped) you left behind in the original Playstation era. Kill all the enemies in the room! Put out all the fires and defend the nuclear reactor! Destroy all the control systems! Protect Colossus (What the hell?!)! Find your way to the entrance! Fly through all the rings! The list goes on and on. This game can be extremely frustrating during the generic "kill all the enemies in the room" objectives. Enemies are armed with guns and electric prods, and I can't tell you how many times I died because I got shocked and shot to death too many times because too many enemies are thrown at you. Then you have to redo a fairly large portion of the crappy level all over again. This game has a health recovery system, but you have to be standing still and hold down a button while you do this, which caused many of my deaths because I couldn't recover my health. This game also has possibly the worst flight mechanics I have ever experienced. When controlling Ice Man he has very badly designed maneuvering abilities which can cause you to hit several objects and damage your health. He also has the worst lock-on system I have ever used in a game. During one particular mission I had to shoot down missiles, but because the lock-on system so horribly designed I failed the mission because I could not lock on properly. It told me where my enemies were, but I had to aim my ice beam and guess where it went. Nightcrawler's abilities are cool to use, but his ability to teleport to the area you are pointing him to often times does not work and you will be going back and forth on objects you don't want him to be on. Boss battles are also badly designed. Juggernaut sure did suck, all I did was run around him to avoid attacks and I just slashed and kicked him to death. The battle with Lady Deathstrike also sucked, mostly because I continuously got sucked into a tornado on the level because of Storm and it damaged my health. Plus, your allies suck most of the time minus Storm. For example: Colossus really sucks, and you have to defend him from being killed by soldiers. OVERALL: Go play the licensed games I listed above instead of this treachery. If you like X-Men play something else.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Nov 29 2006
Ok, I'm writing having just beaten the game at 100% on the hardest difficulty and I must say I have mixed feelings. First of all, I agree with whichever reviewers mentioned the fact that the game has horrible cinematics graphics. Why in the world would we want a cinematics in which people are talking but not moving their lips? I don't care how artsy it may be, it's stupid! For the same reason I enjoy my actors in movies to talk AND move their lips, I enjoy the characters in my video games to do the same, especially in a cinematic. Now then, on to gameplay. There are three characters (granted, a great lack of variety, but I'm just going to ignore that right now). I did like the way you could upgrade mutant abilities throughout the game and even the little bands of DNA you could do it on (I'm taking Genetics right now), however the gameplay itself did not have as consistent a semihappy feeling to me. Iceman can only slide around on his ice... Why can't he walk? Someone, please tell me why Iceman cannot walk? Oh yes, I did enjoy his abilities and they were interesting and all, but why can't he walk? Better yet... why is it that he is nothing but a mutant fire extinguisher except for a few levels? I really got bored of that. However, later (when you finally got to crush things with hailstorms) it was much more fun with Iceman. Wolverine is really cool... I think his slashing and fury skills and healing powers are SO awesome. They did a good job with that, except there's a little lack of variety (paraphrasing what one reviewer said... hacking, then hacking, then hacking some more). Yes, he did not have the most complex of missions. Most of his missions were "kills these guys" and "destroy that one thing after killing these guys" and "now kill THAT guy." I'm aware it's his favorite way to go about things, but he is capable of intelligent work... Oh, and one more thing... Why can't I move the camera around? There's limited camera movement in most (if not all) of wolverine's missions and it bothers me. If I were eviscerating scores of people, I would want to see everything around me... As for Nightcrawler... simply brilliant! I must say he was my favorite mutant even before I got the game, but their design of him and his powers are wonderful. He can do acrobatics, use teleportation to many objects and edges, and use teleportation to enemies (imitating on a near equal scale the teleportation techniques displayed in the second X-Men movie in the oval office fight scene). I also like the fact his skills are used in strategy as well as straight forward fighting (as opposed to nothing but straight forward fighting like Wolverine). The ability to quickly teleport to hit one guy and then teleport to another guy is amazingly done (though, with an understandable limit of how many times you can do this as well as a limit on how much damage Nightcrawler can inflict, lest he be nearly invincible). To sum up, the game itself was ok. If you love Nightcrawler, buy it. If not, it's your choice, but I don't think it's worth it otherwise. It's rather limited with annoying cinematics, redundant strategies with Wolverine, and sometimes interesting sometimes not interesting levels with Iceman. If Nightcrawler wasn't in this game and/or didn't have such awesome gameplay, I'd probably give this game 1 star.
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( 2 of 3 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 3 2006
I really enjoy the X-Men series, and was looking forward to learning more back-story to the latest X3 movie. It was disappointing that this game seems to have been rushed. First, you can only play 3 characters - Wolverine, Iceman and Nightcrawler. I really like the Wolverine character, but his game action is rather feeble. He just hacks, hacks, and then hacks some more. In comparison, Iceman and Nighcrawler are much more fun to play. I enjoy the Iceman's sliding along the pathways he creates, and I love the BAMPF as Nightcrawler teleports from place to place. Still, all 3 are guys! Surely they could have come up with a female character or two for me to play as well? Storm would've been fun, or any of the myrid of other females in the storyline. The sound in the game is great because in general they used the correct voice actors from the movies. So you get to hear Patrick Stewart and all the rest giving their lines. It really does help to immerse you in their world. On the other hand, the graphics are surprisingly poor for an XBox 360 release. I understand that X-Men was a comic strip. I understand the "artistry" behind wanting to keep up that same world. However, the implementation here comes across as pure silliness. You start with a speech being given - and the character who is "speaking" just stares, motionless, at the screen the entire time. Later scenes are even worse. It's almost as if you're watching popsicle-stick theater, with little cardboard representations of the characters being waved around. I appreciate the thought behind this game, what they were aiming for. I think if they'd spent more time developing it, they could have had a really great result. The Iceman sliding and the Nightcrawler BAMPFing was very cool. If they'd added in more characters, provided a more involving environment and given a bit more intricacy to the main gameplay, it could really have been great. As it is, there's not a lot to draw you in and keep you playing. Recommended to rent.
