Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Written by Russ Crandall   
Monday, 01 March 2010 11:18


X-Men Origins: Wolverine is one of the more recent games in a long-standing series of movie tie-ins. And truth be told, we all know how those games usually fare: from Friday the 13th to Enter the Matrix, 99.8% of movie games are pretty garbage. The other .2% can be counted on one hand - Aladdin (Genesis FTW!), Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Goldeneye, and two of the Lord of the Rings games, for starters - and as much as I had initially thought otherwise, Wolverine just doesn't deserve to be in the .2% list.

The game had a fairly decent demo that dropped in May of last year, which actually compelled me to buy the game in the first place. On first impression, the game impresses: it's full of gore, lunging, slashing, and more lunging, and in the first few minutes you rip a helicopter pilot out of his seat and decapitate him with his own chopper's rotors. You then leap from the crashing helicopter, only to plummet towards the ground at a million miles an hour, turning an unsuspecting soldier on the ground into a mist of blood as you make your landing. It's a great start. Unfortunately, poor storytelling, poor combat desicions, and even poorer pacing made me eagerly awaiting the end of the game hours before it was through.


You'll be doing a lot of lunging. At first.

Gameplay flows like a mix of God of War and Star Wars: Force Unleashed; it hits hard but gimmicky enemies tend to slow down the satisfying elements of combat to a crawl. You spend the beginning of the story enthralled by the game's lunge feature, which when used against normal enemies is a lot of fun and makes you feel infinitely powerful. However, about 25% of the way into the game all of the newly-introduced enemies have a counter to your lunge move, and it renders the coolest thing in the game moot. The basic combat elements are satisfying enough, but I can't help but feel that when the developers decided to neuter the lunge move, they neutered the entire game. There are some ridiculous spikes in difficulty as well. In particular, there's a room near the end of the game that is filled with a dozen four-armed, sword-wielding women who doll out cheap shot after cheap shot and required multiple do-overs.

The game's storytelling element is a disjointed, boring mess. As Wolverine, you spend the game phasing in and out of flashbacks from a botched operation in Africa, and by the end you'll be so sick of Africa that you won't want to go to a houseparty hosted by Ludwig Kietzmann any time soon. When you're not facing endless boring jungle puzzles, you spend your time playing out scenes from the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie. But not only does playing out the scenes of a film you've already seen sound boring, it is. What's worse is that these scenes don't play out as quickly as the movie; in fact, they are drawn out into achingly-long levels with countless mundane rooms filled with countless enemies. The cutscenes lack even the shallow character development seen in the film, and simply don't entertain.


Yes! More lunging!

In the end, X-Men Origins: Wolverine fails to hold up to the promise of its first few moments of play. The campaign lasts over 10 hours, which is simply insulting for a game that follows a story you're probably already familiar with. Even if you haven't seen the film this game is based on, it's told so poorly that you won't want to pay attention. I thought that buying this game for $10 online was a great deal; instead I paid $10 to not enjoy what turned out to be a shallow and frustrating experience.
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