X-Men Origins: Wolverine

There are times when a man just loves to be wrong. Seriously. We all love to be right, but from time to time, being wrong is just as good. When it comes to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I was wrong in my presumption that – as a movie based on a Hollywood blockbuster – it would be awful.

And I’m more than happy to admit it, since my admission means that Wolverine is indeed a relatively solid product. Way before you’ve taken control of the man himself, the game doles out the violence and gore in a way that few titles have had the bravery to do. You’ve got soldiers being decapitated by helicopter rotors, folks being chopped in half and pretty much every limb and square inch of flesh that you could think of being scratched and torn right out by Wolverine’s adamantium claws. Needless to say, this is a title that fully deserves its 18 rating.

In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll not spoil the plot of the film – and therefore the game – for you, but will tell you that whilst the gameplay contained here is pretty decent, the plotline gets lost far before you’ve completed the game. Story parts are there – and are generally unskippable, which is unforgivable to say the least – and some will become entangled in what’s going on, but it certainly didn’t drive me to keep playing, let’s put it that way.

The gameplay itself consists of a pretty standard action/adventure third-person camera roaming around behind the eponymous main character. All the old moves such as ledge grabs, double jumps and rope slides are there, and work as well as you’d like them to. What seperates Wolverine apart from other titles in the genre however, is the cinematic quality that the developers have clearly worked hard on. One minute you’ll be fighting a colossal end boss, trying to dodge his humungous fists and target his weak-spot and in the next, you’ll be fighting off gunships using a gun-turret on one that you’ve sequestered for yourself. Throw in a couple of zip lines, a few huge explosions and more hacking and slashing than you can shake a very, very long stick at, and you’ve got level one down.

Whilst not being graphically or sonically anything massively special – indeed, there are some concerning patches of slowdown and pop-up, as well as several big glitches – I can’t stress enough how much of X-Men Origins relative success is down to sheer addictiveness of the gameplay. The close – and far, if you rely on the “lunge” command – combat is really responsive and most importantly of all, it makes sense. If you throw an opponent off a cliff, he dies. If you throw an opponent into another opponent, they both go down like a ton of bricks. If you’re hacking away at the throat of a semi-boss character and a drone enemy wanders into your path, you hit them both. These are things that don’t happen in the majority of other games, and they make things so much more enjoyable, simply because you can unleash your fury as creatively as you wish, without being limited by the game engine. If I want to lunge over a perilous chasm at an enemy a hundred feet away, grab him by the neck and then throw him to his doom using the momentum from the jump, I can – and easily. It simply makes you want to play on.

One fly in the ointment though, is that the game quite often leaves you high and dry in terms of what you have to do next. Early on, you’re standing atop a cliff with three walls blocking any sort of retreat. After four or five minutes of checking every nook and cranny, I finally happened upon an object that I could drag into position to use as a ledge to help me with my progress. Sure, it may only be four or five minutes, but when you’ve got a game that’s as dynamic and genuinely fun as this one is, it’s a shame to break things up as often and as infuriatingly as happens here. A further flaw lies in Wolverine’s jumping animation, which seems to play out ridiculously quickly and makes the character feel somewhat lacking in weight and substance.

Be that as it may, I still thoroughly enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and as a guy with pretty much no interest in the comic books, movie or indeed the previous X-Men games, I think that is endorsement enough. The fact that I can’t wait to see how the next title turns out means that the developers have done their job well and while this is by no means a perfect game, it certainly is an action-packed one. Although, I still can’t help wondering how he manages not to do himself an injury during a bathroom break with those claws.