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User Rating: 5.8 | X-Men 2: Wolverine's Revenge PC

By Vundi | Review Date: April 21, 2003

I've spent about 4 hours or so with the Xbox version and here's what I think so far. Graphics are smooth and clean but it looks like a first generation PS2 game to me. Not a bad thing but I'd expect more from an Xbox game of today. Wolverine himself looks pretty nice. His animations are well done and you can tell they spent a lot of time trying to get him right. Some things, however, are almost laughable to me, like the glass with the way it just kind of flakes off on to the ground when you break it and the way Wolvie's feet always fall through the floor when he walks. They definitely could have spent more time on certain areas of the game. The A.I. isn't that great and the baddies just kind of roam around aimlessly like mindless zombies but it's fun to smack them around. They like to gang up on you though and as such you'll probably find yourself hiding in an isolated corner somewhere while your mutant healing factor fixes you up (which takes forever by the way). You can find some health power-ups lying around here and there but it seems that they're always clumped together so you rarely find them lying around when you really need them. The controls are pretty tight and responsive but things like bad collision detection and the God awful camera make that hard to notice sometimes--I swear I spent almost as much time controlling the camera as I did controlling Wolverine. You have some pretty cool combos to work with and you unlock more as the game goes on but for the most part I found myself reduced to button mashing to best the baddies. They threw in some stealth elements as well but they weren't really done very well and they are more of a hassle than a welcomed addition to gameplay. However, the stealth kills are pretty fun to pull of and you have to pull them off from time to time to progress in the game and they also help you unlock certain bonuses. Speaking of bonuses, there are some sweet extras in the game like art galleries and several alternate costumes that'll keep you playing just to unlock all this cool stuff........maybe. The sound is so-so. The music is fairly well done albeit rather uninspired. I think it would sound more at home in a game like Shadows of the Empire, but that's just me. If you're playing the Xbox version, you can play your own soundtrack so yipee for that. All the bad guys suffer from "clone syndrome" and always seem to utter the same little phrases and one-liners as well as let out the same "UHG!" when you kill them. More diversity here would have been nice. I would have liked to see Wolverine being a bit more vocal as he is one of the best trash talkers in Marvel's line up and for the most part he's pretty silent. I also would have liked to see the environment be a little more interactive. For a guy with Adamantium blades sticking out of his hands, you would think that slicing a bed in half or popping a locker open would be a gimmie but I guess they overlooked that part. A Halo-like checkpoint save system would have also been a welcomed addition because, as it is right now, when you die or fail one of your objectives, you have to start over from the beginning and this makes for a really tiresome trial and error experience I just don't care for. In the end, I would not recommend that you purchase this game. This is the kind of game that fans of the source material would enjoy more than the casual player but even that isn't a sure thing. At best I'd say give it good long rental and let it be. If I were to use GameSpot's ranking system, I'd give it a well earned 5.8.

X2: Wolverine's Revenge

Bad game. Simply bad.