Baldur's Gate meets Marvel. Besides a few minor flaws, this game is really fun. I don't think I would attempt to play it one player, as you control four X-Men at one time with less than perfect AI. The problem with four players though is that there are long sections of the game where it defaults back to one player leaving the other players to stare blankly at the screen.
The story centers around a young girl named Alison who has recently come to discover, understand and develop her mutant powers, eventually taking the code name Magma. During the first exhibition of power, she's discovered by the Brotherhood of Mutants who attempt to subdue her for their own designs. Of course, the X-Men step in to try and help her and eventually take her back to the mansion, attempting to teach and recruit.
The mansion becomes the hub for all activity including side
A dungeon crawler
with X-Men.
Assemble your team from
a ton of X-Men.
quests, in-depth story discussion, Danger Room training and mission initiation. The mansion parts get old. Fast. The mansion is fairly large with three floors a garden area and a hangar. It takes quite a while to run around the whole thing with fairly sizable loading times between areas. In between missions you are sent back to the mansion to talk to different members of the team that could be anywhere in the mansion, leaving you to search high and low. The automapping resets every time you are returned. Certain hidden items are only obtainable at certain times, leaving you to re-explore the entire thing everytime if you want to find everything. Not to mention if you're playing with four people as aforementioned, the three people get to watch player one run around the mansion as Magma. Similarly, unless we missed something, you have to tackle each flash back as it comes, such as old school Cyke, Jean and Nightcrawler fighting sentinels on the streets of New York, or Wolverine's flashback of his Weapon-X days and escaping from the lab. As far as I can tell these things only give you extra experience and no great rewards.
There are a variety of hidden items around including Danger Room discs to provide extra training, comic books, and concept art. When you find these things they become available for viewing in the mansion's various rooms. There are also several pieces of equipment that can be found, and "tech bits" used as money to buy things from Forge's machine shop or the Morlock healer's shop. Equipment includes a decent variety of equipment to boost stats, lower weakness to elements or types of damage, or increase mutant energy regeneration. Some are generic and can be purchased, some loot is rare, named from characters in the Marvel Universe and must be found from drops or hidden in the environment. The only problem is, so many of the items are only effective against one thing (e.g. robots) and changing equipment for each swarm of enemies gets a little old.
There is a huge cast of playable X-Men; Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Beast, Nightcrawler, Gambit, Psylocke,
There are swarms of nameless thug mutants to eliminate.
Watch out for advanced Sentinels.
Emma Frost, Jubilee, Colossus, Jean Grey, Professor Xavier and others, each with their own almost completely unique skilltree. All characters have melee attacks of varying power, three mutant powers, and one huge spastic mutant power. When mutant powers are unleashed on a foe at the same time or in quick succession, bonus combo damage is added, further increased by building up the Leadership passive ability with Storm or Cyclops. When you play one player you have limited control over when your comrades should use mutant power and you can set up the AI in the menus about when to use health packs, which mutant power to use, and their aggression level in battle. You can also instantly change your playable character by pressing the control pad in the direction of the assigned mutant. You can switch between group members at an X-Traction point which serves as a save point and shop as well.
Enemies consist of human soliders, Brotherhood thugs and mutants, Morlocks and sentinels. Bosses are mostly famous mutants like Pyro, Mystique, Blob and Magneto and also various forms of machinery. Some enemies have strengths to certain types of attacks so you must have a team that is built to handle all types. Playing four player it took us a while to find a well balanced team, but when we ended up being able to cover all weaknesses we were set. I played Cyclops for the majority of the time, Kirk was Iceman, Jade was Wolverine and Brock was Storm. We had Leadership traits on two people which majorly boosted our combo damage, we had half the team capable of doing non-physical damage, Iceman has a good freeze for crowd control and making enemies easier and Wolverine with his self-healing power and huge physical damage made a good front man. The only thing we were missing was a Telepath which we would sub in when the puzzles required it.
Enemies give experience that goes to every X-Man you have in party or in reserve. So even if you aren't using your reserves, or if someone dies they still level up with the rest of the party. If you have one or two characters for a certain scene and no others are available, like during the first stage or a flashback, then only that character will receive the experience.
Graphically, the game looks great in high definition on my widescreen TV. The environments have a great clarity of detail to them. The character models are fairly stiff and in cutscenes Wolverine's face is worth a few laughs but most of the game with the isometric, three-quarters perspective, the characters are pretty zoomed out, and from a distance they look good. The art style is almost a cel-shaded look on the characters, but its not overpronounced. We got a few graphical glitches occasionally, with Wolverine's claws not appearing and Cyclops' beam showing up at the tip of his visor and when it hit its target, but nothing in between. Usually reloading would solve the problem.
You can destroy everything! Barrels, walls, windows, computers, everything is destructible! Always adds value.
The music provided a good environmental feel, providing the sense of danger and urgency. Patrick Stewart voices Professor Xavier, which is always a treat, hearing his voice, especially as the flagship character and advisor. Still the best casting choice they made for the movies, in my humble opinion.
The game is slightly longer than the average console dungeon crawler. Most of this is probably due to the monotonous exploration, the Danger Room trainings and the optional flashbacks, but there is still quite a bit of story and level depth. We made it through in an extra long one-sitting of seventeen hours. Haven't done that in a long time.