Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 05 May 2009 12:20

Entertainment

The game is at its heights during, what in other games would be the more mundane sections, the grunt battles.  The bloody battles have enough variety to keep interest piqued for the duration of each sequence.

Making use of the environment, by invoking Wolverines feral senses to locate deadly spikes and so forth to skewer opponents is great fun, add to this the guilty pleasures of severing limbs, tossing hapless special ops soldiers over cliffs and causing general mayhem and it takes a long time for the essentially repetitive game-play to get old.

The visual aspects of XO:W varies quite markedly.  The best sections are outdoors; with the jungle environments having a distinct Uncharted: Drakes Fortune feel to them, whist the indoor “Weapon X” facility and other military establishments maintaining a clichéd and workman like series of corridors that shepherd Wolverine through a series of unlocked ‘green’ doors to each objective.

There is some camera wrestling to be had, some bad smoke effects that, I guess achieve the goal of obscuring the action, the occasional floating limb or body and a nasty sound glitch that had me restarting the game in order to remove constant static ringing through my ears.

Again, the outdoor environments showcased a superior level design to the backtracking and endless corridors or simple puzzle design of indoor battles.  The vertigo inducing jungle sensor array tower was a particular highlight, revealing how much God of War was an influence on the design team.

There are plenty of collectibles, though the immersion destroying collectible ‘action figures’ were a strange choice.  Collect enough and unlock extra challenges that subsequently grant Wolverine a handful of in-game uniforms, such as the classic early day comic uniform.

There is a lot of fun to be had in this game, not so much in the annoying jumping puzzles, where the controls feel sloppy, but definitely in the comparatively the enjoyable and over-the-top violent combat.

8 Mutagens out of 10