Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this game includes fist fights, explosions, and shooting. All of the violence is bloodless, but players punch, stab, and zap hundreds of realistic-looking enemies, as well as a healthy dose of mutants and monsters. The game is based more on the recent X-Men movies than the comic books and features the likenesses of many actors from the films.
Families can talk about how this game is related to new X-Men movie. What's appealing about these games based on movies? How do games help promote movies? Why is it that these games are often only mediocre?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Chris Jozefowicz
The X-Men, like many comic book creations, provide just about everything needed to make a great action video game: larger-than-life characters, fantastic powers and weapons, and incredible settings. Yet X-MEN: THE OFFICIAL GAME fails to live up to its potential. In fact, it's a bore.
The game's storyline serves as a prequel to the third movie in the franchise. Players alternate playing as three characters -- Iceman, Nightcrawler and Wolverine -- in a series of short, character-specific missions, winding through a convoluted story that involves both evil mutants and hostile military forces. Along the way they team up with other, non-playable X-Men from the movies and comics.
The game does give each character a distinct style: Iceman flies on a platform of ice and fires freezing rays; Nightcrawler teleports and swings acrobatically into fights; and fan-favorite Wolverine claws his way though enemy masses as a straight-up brawler.
Too bad the game gets bogged down in repetitive action. Players will tire of marching through sterile levels, facing the same sort of obstacles again and again (such as Wolverine's endless slashing though enemy soldiers).
The game's presentation is also dull. A few of the cut scenes use colorful comic panels, but more often the story is advanced in a kind of movie/comic book hybrid: voiceovers (contributed by the stars of the movie, including Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart) on top of lifeless stills drawn in a realistic style. Even the varied environments -- which include Japanese gardens, secret laboratories, and the Brooklyn Bridge -- are quiet and empty.
Altogether, X-Men is an uninspired game. Fans of the franchise will have more fun playing X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse.
Rate It!
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ViolenceNo blood, but lots of brawling and shooting. Wolverine executes brutal-looking stabbing attacks. Lots of sci-fi weapons and explosions. |
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Social BehaviorLurking behind the pulp of the comics and the movies is a story about the power of being different. |
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CommercialismThe game is set in the world of the X-Men movies and uses the likenesses and voices of actors in the movies. |
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