Friday, June 08, 2007


X-men 3 – Completed

I tend to be fairly critical of super hero games when they are plat formers. It seems to take away the true capabilities of the hero. But in this version of X-men I was amazed to see how well it was done.

There are three characters played through the game: wolverine, Iceman, and Night crawler. Unlike sonic you have to play all the characters in order to continue through the game. This kept the game from feeling repetitive while not spreading the story to thin. Also when completing levels you get mutant genes that upgrade your characters powers in five or so categories. These upgrades made the levels easier when playing in the harder modes.

Wolverine’s levels are pretty normal hack and slashing, though I found out quickly that I was putting my upgrades in the wrong areas. This made some of the levels seems fairly impossible and when I start to upgrade the correct areas the game flattened out and became playable. Until that point it did become slightly frustrating.

Iceman’s levels were fun because the game play was almost that of a shooter. Your constantly sliding on a ice wave firing off hail and ice beams. Some levels have you racing through tunnels and brings back fond memories of Luke on a speeder bike racing around trees with lasers flying about. In general Iceman was fun to play the only difficulty was trying to find the side items in each level, since his levels were fairly large or ran through at high speeds it was difficult to spot things.

Night crawler was by far the most enjoyable portion of the game. Teleporting from here to there and when it comes to fighting you got to use a single button to teleport behind your enemy and punch them repeatedly. Imagine the first scene from X-men 2 where he is jumping through the white house, and that is exactly how the game play feels. The control of teleport along with the ease of use was done so well I was quite amazed. My hopes are for a sandbox X-men game with him as a playable character!

The game was 7 out of 10, good graphics and controls. But it was very short taking less then a day for me to beat and get all of the achievements.


brooklyn naval shipyard