X2: Wolverine's Revenge

By: Michael Levy

As a comic book and video game fan, you want the best of both worlds when you play a comic book video game. For the most part, you’re typically let down. I mean, do I even have to bother quoting Superman 64 as a perfect bad example? X-Men fans are especially the ones who have been bitten the worst. In X-Men for NES, you barely knew what was going on, let alone enjoyed it. Wolverine for the NES was also plagued with awkward controls and boring gameplay. Even the mighty 16 Bit systems saw their troubles when it came to X-Men games. Arcade’s Revenge difficulty was totally off balance (Anyone remember the impossible Juggernaut level?) and Wolverine: Adamantium Rage saw good ideas clash with poor coding. Despite some shining graces (Konami’s X-Men arcade game and the recent X-Men Legends games), the marvelous mutants have failed at almost every game they’ve been in.

While all was looking bleak, a handheld game made by Vicarious Visions was released featuring the X-Men’s most popular mutant, Wolverine. The game, X2: Wolverine’s Revenge, brings hope and healing to the painful sting that companies such as Acclaim and others have brought upon the franchise.

The story involves Wolverine and his fellow X-Men plotting to stop Magneto, but don’t look for anything too deep. This game is reminiscent of the decent X-Men 2: Clone Wars for the Genesis, and X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse for SNES in that it puts fun factor and gameplay before story. Too often are game companies putting story before gameplay. After all, aren’t the fans playing the game, not reading the game?

Despite this, I still feel that story is important, and what you see is what you get. This game is a combination of numerous different settings and stories of Logan’s past, including Weapon X, Japan, and Canada, as well as the X-Mansion itself. It doesn’t exactly follow its console counterpart, and that’s a good thing. Those of you who have played it on the current generation of consoles know that the game suffers from horrifying control and ridiculously unbalanced difficulty (There’s a part with gun turrets that almost made me weep, it was so hard)!

Put the console version behind you, because in this one, Logan’s battles are fierce and fun. This game relies less on sneaking (though there are stealth aspects of the game) and more on slashing, punching action that we’ve seen in the past. As far as the sneaking missions go, it would have been nice to see some sort of reward or loss for succeeding in stealth kills. That is a large gripe with the game that I had. Why bother with the sneaking missions if you can just go through most of the game and just kill everything in sight? What difference does it make if you stealth kill or normal kill?

Wolverine has some great moves in this game, including clinging to walls, double jump, downward thrust into enemies from above, and ceiling scathing. However, it would have been nice to start out with all these moves instead of earning them through secrets. Especially since most of them come in handy when fighting the bosses. It sort of gives the game a Metroid feel in this sense, but this game isn’t designed like Metroid, level wise. It plays like any old school platform game from the past, and while that is a good thing it also is a bit of a curse. Spending your time searching for things like “double jump” seem trivial, especially when the effort could have been put into extending the amount of levels. While each level is fairly long, there are only 8 missions to choose from. There are also 8 danger room bonuses that can be found throughout the main game. These seem like an afterthought, thrown in to extend relay value. Nevertheless, they are fun to toy around with.

Sound-wise, the game’s music bounces back and forth from orchestral related to almost industrial (the danger room/boss music for example is extremely catchy in an almost heavy metal sort of way). Sound effects don’t extend from grunts of pain, but the occasional “SNIKT” eases all of the Ol’ Canuckle Head’s fans.

While there are some problems with this game, it’s a step closer to what an X-Men game should play like. It has responsive control, its fun, and it doesn’t try too hard to put story over gameplay. The overall package is strong, but at times, Wolverine and X-Men fans might ask themselves “Why am I bothering to try stealth when I can just kill everything?” At this point, for a handheld X-Men game, this is the cream of the crop.

3 star(s) out of 5

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