X2: Wolverine's Revenge
From a third-person perspective you’ll battle innumerable underlings as well as “boss” super-villains straight from the X-Men and Wolverine comics, including Magneto, Sabretooth, and Juggernaut. While the action part of this hybrid is satisfyingly mindless, the adventure element supplies some refreshing depth. The puzzles are logical and tense — with great use made of the ol’ “poisoned and against the clock” gambit — without being too difficult.
In fact, the seamless transition between melee mayhem and “think-it-through” adventuring is one of X2WR’s finest accomplishments. Many games aspire to an action/adventure combination, but settle for an action game with “don’t raise any alarms” missions and frustrating jumping puzzles. But X2WR is surprisingly frustration-free: the smart design of both the action and adventure phases keeps the pace bubbling and never allows it to bog down into either melee-malaise or puzzle-hunting.
Each of the story’s six acts houses three or so levels. It’s up to you whether Wolverine should enter an area hacking and slashing everything in sight, or take a stealthier approach. Wolvie can take advantage of his powers, such as a “sixth sense” that can show danger areas unseen to the human eye (exposing hidden enemies, mines, and so on), accelerated healing (when his claws are retracted), and a “berserker rage” boost to unleash more damage during fighting.
As a fun console-style gameplay addition, you can find and pick up three kinds of dogtags, which add strength and can also be used to unlock artwork in the game’s Gallery section. Comic-book covers are also littered around the game world, used to switch between Wolverine costumes (from the comic books and the feature film). Yeah, these are devices straight out of the kiddie park, but they’re cool nonetheless.
Controlling Wolverine during combat can prove difficult, especially using a keyboard and mouse: not only is it tricky to toggle between enemies, but the frame-rate slows when you face more than one. Moreover, the camera often swivels randomly during combat to an angle that’s not conducive to the situation. If you aim to enjoy this game, then you’d better have a gamepad.