Magneto has gathered another Brotherhood of Evil to take over the world and only the X-Men can stop them again. The group of X-Men here includes Cyclops (in his classic remix of the school uniform), Wolverine (in the brown and orange outfit), Nightcrawler (in his original Dave Cockrum outfit), Colossus, Storm (in punk rock mode) and Iceman (who hadn't been an X-Man for quite a while, but it was great to see him back in the fold!). What should've followed was a classic confrontation in the Mighty Marvel Manner ... a pulse-pounding chapter in the never-ending saga between the students of Xavier and the minions of Magneto where the very fate of the free world hangs in the balance!! Instead of that, we got a 'game' (if you could call it that) chock full of short, chunky and inaccurate characters and, much worse, shoddy gameplay. I remember reading that the game's release was pushed back, so we may have been given an unfinished game. With some finishing touches, the programmers may have been able to salvage this game. Unfortunately, we got a game riddled with cheap hits. If you're one of those people who equate crappy gameplay as a challenge, then this game is for you! (you chumps)

This is probably the coolest thing in the entire game... dig the Dave Cockrum influence in the Iceman and Nightcrawler portraits!

The first thing that you'll notice is that 1-player mode forces you to take a CPU-controlled 2nd player who just seems to have a completely random AI routine. I've seen spastic 8-year-olds wacked-out on Sugar Babies and Pixie Sticks with a better sense of battlefield tacitics than the games' AI. It usually keeps running against a wall, into enemies, takes your power-ups and eventually dies in a trap. In other words, you pick a character to be a sacrificial lamb. Some basic enemies emerge from the ground without warning and right in front of you, which causes you to take cheap, unavoidable damage. Even worse, there are parts of the floor on many stages that cause damage to your character without looking any kind of hazard (like lava, acid, normal tap water, etc.). You'll figure out that these things can hurt you once your character is dead and you get the pleasure of playing that level all over again. Oh, and you have to pause the game to look at your life bar. That way, you can't fully appreciate how the cheat hits take their toll. Finally, the difficulty of the bosses is pretty much based on no pattern at all but how they shoot their randomly-aimed projectiles and their amount of hit points. More on that noise later in the review...

Withness the excitement of fighting... I... don't know what things are. I'm sorry.

Now let's have fun with how these inaccurate these characters are, shall we? Alright. There are minor mistakes like how Wolverine has his uniform colors reversed. Minor thing, really. Then you've got things like how Storm has the same body shape as the male characters of the game. HOW COULD YOU DO THAT? BOO THAT S-(bleep), SON! Then again, every playable character in this game has nearly the same body. Still, boo that, I sez. Then there are the certain characters who don't have any 'projectile' powers in the comics (like the Juggernaut) suddenly have the ability to throw... stuff. Juggernaut looks as if he's throwing fire, but that's Pyro's gig, man. C'mon, people. Basically, every boss just walks around random directions and shoots stuff in random directions. The strategy to beating them mostly involves dodging projectiles and trying not to think about how idiotic the game really is. Of course, the biggest offender of this the final boss Magneto, who shoots the fastest random projectiles and can easily trap you in a corner. In what is probably the most glaring mistake of the entire game, Nightcrawler has Kitty Pryde's power to walk through walls. Seriously. Nightcrawler's famous ability to teleport is gone and has been replaced by Kitty Pryde's ability to become intangible. This game is just that painfully bad.

Since when did the Juggernaut have the power to throw fire at people? Man, that whole "screw continuity" policy Marvel may have been inspired by this game.

This game stands as a true test of how bad a comic-based game could be and a shining example of the fact that companies know comic fans will buy a game no matter how sucky it looks. Then again, you can say the same for the X-Men comic books sometimes. So, you know, we comic fans seem to be asking for it. Then again, there's a big difference between paying a few bucks for a bad comic book and paying $30 to $50 for a horrible game. This game taught me that and I thank LJN/Acclaim for this. Buy this game only if you're trying to collect every X-Men game ever and don't plan on playing it. This is also recommended for those people who think that cheap gameplay makes for a good challenger.	Gameplay
	Graphics
	Sound
	Control
	Overall

the X-Men, Magneto, the Juggernaut and all other related characters © Marvel comics

Return to Reviews

Return to Main Menu