Raven Software, you’ve given some GEMS over the years. Heretic 2? Quake 4? Jedi Outcast? Hell yea! You’ve also tackled a few X-men games and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Alright, you’ve got a pretty impressive resume. I see you can handle super hero games, but lets not forget the overwhelming number of terrible video games made after movies by everyone and their mom. You think you have what it takes to handle a big-screen super-power like Wolverine? And you want it to coincide with the new Wolverine Movie?!? We’ll see you cocky bastards. Let’s check out X-men Origins: Wolverine for the Xbox 360. (Hold up video game)
Story
X-Men Origins: Wolverine the game follows pretty much the same story as the new movie of the same title, just in much greater depth. So if you’re a comic book junkie, or just want more information that the movie may have left out, this game will let you fill in a lot of the gaps.
The game begins by detailing James “Logan” Howett’s adventures in Africa with the all-mutant “Team X”. We then bounce backwards and forwards in time encountering events throughout his tragic life. We get an in-depth view of Logan’s escape from the Weapon X facility in Alkali Lake, his run-in with Gambit in the Corbeau Casino, and of course the island where he learns all of his life’s secrets before encountering Deadpool.
Unlike many other games made from movies, Wolverine actually makes sense. There isn’t anything out of the ordinary that would make you think, “What, why did they put that in the game? Where is THAT in the movie?” It is interesting and actually pretty dang fun right from the beginning. What I really enjoyed were the hidden story elements and background voices providing tons of additional information about Wolverine and the characters around him that influence his life. I won’t get into any details though; I don’t want to give any spoilers.
Design
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a hack/slash button masher at its best, similar to the Devil May Cry series. The game is nearly constant combat where each kill yields a small portion of experience. Once enough experience is earned, you gain a level, granting you a few skill points that you can use to increase Logan’s attributes such as the strength of his claws, his health and rage, and his special abilities. Experience can also be gained by completing objectives and grabbing dog tags off of hidden soldier corpses. Logan also gains the ability to use up to 3 mutagens that allow you to add and customize passive bonuses to your stats, such as more health, faster regeneration and extra damage to certain enemies.
The game’s levels are for the most part linear, as there are no side quests. You simply run from one end of the level to then other. There are some puzzles scattered here and there, but they are all extremely simple to figure out so that you aren’t bogged down with too much thinking. This game is all about beating the crap out of everything, and it’s BLOODY!
Achievements are pretty easy to unlock, as the first few hours they were popping up left and right simply from playing the game and killing enemies with special combos. You can also unlock different classic wolverine costumes to play the game in, as well as additional difficulty levels once you beat the game. From start to finish, this game should take you between 12 and 15 hours, but it has a lot of replayability simply because it’s so fun to beat the snot out of everything that moves with your large variety of abilities.
Gameplay
Wolverine has a HUGE arsenal of moves to handle the different enemies but this is also a double-edged sword because lots of the time I forgot how to properly execute them when I needed to and got whooped up on. Different enemies require different tactics to defeat them. You can’t simply lunge at every bad buy and pummel them with your claws.
Wolverine of course has regenerating health so if you start to take too much damage, you can avoid death by dodging and blocking, or even just running away long enough for your health to regenerate. As you kill enemies, small red orbs appear and are sucked into your body giving you rage. Special abilities are executed by draining rage from this bar. These abilities are extra powerful and usually will take out entire groups of enemies, but because there are SO MANY enemies continually coming at you, the special abilities aren’t overpowered, but more a necessity to stay alive.
One really cool feature of the game is Wolverine’s Feral Senses. When turned on, everything becomes a little hazy, but enemies glow bright orange, even if they are invisible to the human eye. Any object that you can interact with glow green and a bright blue smoky trail points you in the direction to your next objective. Wolverine can also pick up and throw enemies into lots of the objects that are spotted in feral senses and impale them giving all kinds of extra ways to take them out! (show some impalements and quicktime finishers.
Presentation
X-Men Origins: Wolverine utilizes the power of the Unreal Engine 3 and the graphics are beautiful and lifelike. There is a wide variety of color in the different environments so you get away from the pools of brown and grey in most games that utilize the same engine. The frame rate is always high and it never dips or lags. The game uses both pre-rendered and game-engine rendered cut-scenes. The pre-rendered cut-scenes look absolutely amazing, almost as if they were taken straight from the movie. The only downside is there aren’t enough of them. The game-engine rendered cut-scenes look great and there are just enough of them to not annoy you, making sure you still have plenty of time to mash faces.
The right thumb stick controls the camera as you would expect. It is fluid and actually never gets in the way or prevents you from seeing what you need to see. As Wolverine takes damage, you’ll actually see it on him. If a rocket hits him in the chest, you’ll see a huge hollow hole through his torso, and being that he regenerates his health, the wound goes away over time. It’s pretty awesome.
Unlike my last review of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, the voice acting in Wolverine is great. Logan and Victor Creed both share the same voice actors as they had in the movie, but most of the others are acted by others. Fortunately that doesn’t matter as they are all really convincing and the major characters all look EXACTLY like their movie representations.
Summary
Raven Software, you’ve done it! Finally a good game made after a movie! Though can we really claim this game was made after the movie? I mean, even though it was released the time the movie came out and under the same name, and even kind of followed the events in the movie, there is simply so much extra in this game that it almost seems that it’s not based on the movie after all. (Show math symbols and equations popping up pointing to an infinite loop or something).
The graphics are awesome, the gameplay is fun, there is tons of action and blood and really cool special effects and abilities. The story is awesome and answers so many questions you may have had about the title character, but does this game merit the $60 price tag? Tough to say. I got it for my birthday and it gave me a lot of enjoyment. Should you buy it? Hardcore comic junkies, yes. Action button smasher junkies, yes. Everyone else? Wait till you can pick it up for 30-40 bucks.
