Title: X-Men: The Official Game

Date: 06.01.2006

Genre: Third-person action/adventure

Platform: PlayStation 2

Developer: Z-Axis

Publisher: Activision

X-Men: The Official Game is another fun, if not exceptional X-Men game that borrows its inspiration from the movies. This game takes place between the second and third movies. It doesn't really serve as a prequel, as it doesn't set up anything in the new film. It does, however, explain why a particular character is a no-show in The Last Stand.

X-Men: The Official Game is a fairly standard brawler--sort of. There are three playable characters, and you have to play them all throughout the game. The game has a specific mission progression (and there are quite a lot of missions), and each mission is tied to a character. You cannot use one character in another character's mission. It's nice in that you really get to experience each character, but if you really despise one of them you're out of luck--you have to use them anyway. Wolverine, Iceman, and Nightcrawler each play a bit differently. Their powers are all well-represented--all the signature powers are there, and they're easy to pull off.

Wolverine is a straight-up brawler. He has his claws, mutant healing factor, and frenzy. He has two levels to his life bar--one decreases faster than the other, and heals naturally over time. When he has a break between waves of enemies he can trigger his healing factor and more quickly regenerate both bars of his health meter. As he takes damage his Frenzy gauge builds up, and when it's full he can go berserk--he attacks and moves incredibly quickly, and his health regenerates. You can also sheath and unsheath his claws at will.

Nightcrawler is more of a platformer. He has plenty of brawling in his missions, but they are designed more to take advantage of his teleport ability. A couple of his missions are very frustrating, as there are several leaps of faith, and a fall can mean starting at the beginning of the level, or at least back a ways in the stage. He does have checkpoints in a couple of his levels, but you still need to replay larger chunks of them when you die than I'd prefer. Fighting with him is dang fun, though. Remember his intro scene in X-Men 2? Yeah, you can do that. He also has the fastest health recovery ability of the three.

Iceman is an entirely different character than the other two. He rides along on his ice slide and has a couple of ranged attacks and a shield. He can also boost to go faster. Iceman's missions are by far the most annoying. There are only a couple of missions when he's in any danger if dieing, but he has to deal with a lot of time limits, and a couple of protect Object X missions. So you'll fail his missions a lot--just not because you died. The ice slide is awesome--if you circle around you can see your trail, and it does crack and fall fairly quickly. One thing to watch out for with Iceman is his balance--if his angle is too steep he loses his balance and flails for a couple seconds. It's annoying, but you can get around it. His Ice Beam can be fired as a continuous stream, and his Hailstorm has homing properties. He only has passive health regeneration, but it's decently quick.

The character models are very well-done. They look very much like their move counterparts. They're not as big as in some games, but they get the job done. The animations, however, are merely passable. The most impressive is Nightcrawler's teleport, which is complete with the wisps of black smoke just like in the second movie. On the other end of the spectrum are the attack animations. They are not that fluid at all--and there aren't all that many of them. The individual attacks aren't too bad, but a full attack string just looks choppy. The backgrounds range from mediocre (power station) to pretty (Master Mold). There isn't anything spectacular enough to jump out at you as far as backgrounds go. The cut-scenes are unique-they're slightly animated panels with voice-over. The voices are mostly good, but Wolverine's voice started to annoy me as I progressed.

X-Men: The Official Game is pretty short. There are a good number of missions, but they don't take all that long to complete. There is, however, some good replayability. Most stages have two types of data to collect, and collecting them all yields new costumes for the characters. Each character has two costumes to unlock (one for each set of data). You can go back and replay a mission at any time to finish collecting the ones that you missed the first time through. As long as you complete a mission, all the data you collected is saved, so you only have to pick up the ones that you missed when you go back.

Then there's the character advancement system. Every mission grants a certain number of Mutations for completing it. Usually the number of Mutations you get differs based on what difficulty you complete the mission at--the higher the difficulty, the more you get. These Mutations are used to level up the characters' abilities--anything from attack power to regeneration rate to Iceman's balance. If you can't beat a mission at a high difficulty, complete it at a lower difficulty and come back to it later when you have more Mutations. Likewise, if you're stuck on a mission you can go back and redo previous missions at higher difficulties to amass more Mutations. There are enough Mutations to max every character.

In the end, X-Men: The Official Game is a fun way to kill a day or two. You probably won't need more than a weekend to completely beat it, and the lack of a multiplayer mode means that once you're done with it there's nothing to make you want to come back. It's not a horrible game by any means, but nothing about it really stands out. It's more or less average from a technical standpoint. Play this if you want to know what happens between X2 and X3, or if you just want another X-Men game to play. It probably won't appeal much to non-X-Men fans, though. I'd recommend renting it as opposed to buying it, as you'll likely be able to complete it within the rental period, and there isn't much to keep you playing after you unlock everything.

Game Score

6.6

Reviewed By: Contributed