Bad game. Simply bad.
X2: Wolverine's Revenge undertakes the ambitious task of making a player feel like Wolverine, possibly one of the coolest X-Men of all times.
Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the game fails. It attempts to incorporate stealth action, sneak kills and combo moves, but carries out each in a mediocre way at best.
With Splinter Cell redefining stealth action, Livesay Technology were in for a fight if they wanted to compete. They lost the fight. The stealth mode, although accompanied by original visual effects, usually ends up in a quick execution à la Blood Omen 2, where one could see Kain perform the same coup de grâce on unsuspecting foes over and over again, given that the conditions are correct. Result: poorly executed stealth action.
As for the combo moves and special attacks; well needless to say, they are excessively repetitive and although they are very wolverine-like, lack a certain "oumph" that a catchy Wolverine quote would have provided, i.e. "Come'n get it bub! *claw noise*"
Now if we take the time to compare the so called combo moves to the ones found in some other games like Prince of Persia, we'll be sure to realize that X2: Wolverine's Revenge is simply below par.
In addition, the gameplay is linear and redundant: kill the soldiers, get the key card, break the power generator, find the plot twist, run into a mutant, repeat from the start. The End.
Now for the technical aspects...
The game is a poor port; it's capacity to properly utilize a computer's hardware to render beautifully drawn environments is very lacking. Another point worth mentioning is the fact that the palette of resolutions to chose from is slightly restricted, and does not feature the LCD Screen standard optimal resolution of 1280x1024.
Final visual drawback: missing textures. THE biggest no-no in game development; in several areas of the game, one will find that walls which should be textured are simply an extremely unimpressive flat black, which has no light mapping nor bump mapping, making it essentially, a window into the blackness of bad game oblivion.
The sound... as we have found out with games like Final Fantasy, if used properly, the soundtrack and sound effects of a game can make the difference between a good game and a masterpiece. Wolverine's Revenge shows us a new low... the sound quality turns a bad game into a horrible game; all the sounds or of a mediocre quality, with a low bit rate and the voice overs seem to all be done by the same person, who's talent for changing his voice is not worthy of mention.
The worst of evils, the one which will guarantee that you don't play past chapter 3: the save game system is a punishment spawned from the depths of hell to compel youths to turn their backs on video games.
You get to save at the beginning of the level via checkpoint. Period. Suffice it to say that when Sabertooth kills you 4 or 5 times after a 20 minute stage in a level, you eventually end the gaming experience the same way that monopoly games end 95% of the time (See Dane Cook's Retaliation): the player stands up, throws an object located nearby and screams "F**K THIS!!!"
Bottom line: It really wasn't worth the 4$ I paid for it.