X-Men: The Official Game

(Activision for PS2)
by Mike Delano

It doesn’t have to be this way… All game tie-ins to blockbuster movies don’t have to be horrific, slapdash affairs that exist only to create hype around a movie’s release date. But X-Men: The Official Game, released alongside X-Men: The Last Stand in summer 2006, certainly lives up to all of the stereotypes associated with movie/game disasters, and as such, stands proudly alongside Wolverine shower heads, Rogue onion ring containers from Burger King, and Magneto bedspreads as examples of the heaps of disposal crap stirred up by $200 million movie releases.

There’s a laundry list of problems here, so let’s just stick to the major ones that make it pretty much unplayable. The overall presentation – from the static, SNES-caliber cut scenes to the ugly menus to the underwhelming graphics – make a bad impression from the start, and that’s before you take control of one of three (!) selectable X-Men and experience the flailing, Final Fight-in-a-coma gameplay. The scenarios, like Iceman sky-surfing around the Statue of Liberty or Wolverine hacking through an army of armed guards, offer ample promise for excitement, but since the game fails to deliver on those promises, level after level, there’s no choice but to abandon ship for one of the several comic-based games that does.
(www.activision.com)