X2 : Wolverine's Revenge (Gamecube)
This week, I'm digging out the adamantium and reviewing Wolverine's Revenge. Come check it out.
In addition to these, there are numerous combos you can utilize in the game during combat. Any mixture of punching/claw attacking, kicking, and crouching can net you any number of different outcomes from chaining the attacks together.
It's a fun control scheme, and makes excellent use of every button on the controller, however it can be a little clunky and slow sometimes. Otherwise, it is very straightforward and easy to use. Let's see just how it does during the game.
The basic combat consists of the player's choice of mixing up Logan's punches and kicks. You can choose to have his claws out or put away, but with them out the damage done is significantly increased. When you take damage during combat, you can utilize his healing factor by withdrawing the claws, and then avoiding damage for a few moments until his health bar starts to refill itself. Above the health bar is Wolverine's rage bar. This begins to fill whenever you deal damage to an opponent, and any prolonged period of not dealing damage will slowly start to drain the bar. Once it begins filling it is green, but after reaching the halfway point it turns red. After the red portion is reached, you can double tap the Z button to trigger his rage ability. In rage mode, Wolverine can move much master, deal even more damage, and becomes almost impervious to damage while this mode lasts. In addition, the rage mode is automatically triggered if the bar is filled up completely.
Outside of combat, Wolverine has his stealth and senses mode. In this mode, time appears to move a little bit slower indicating his heightened senses. You can see footprints for a short while, allowing you to track where your enemies go, you can see scent trails so if someone is hiding around a corner from you, you'll have a bit more of an advantage on them. Heat signatures also are visible, letting you see enemies from a bit further away as well as any landmines that could be hidden underground. Lastly, in this mode, you are able to utilize Stealth Strikes, which are completely silent attacks you can use to take out one single enemy if you've managed to go completely undetected in an area.
The Strikes and Stealth Strike moves come in four different levels. You immediately have access to the first level once you enter the game, and the subsequent levels are unlocked by obtaining a required amount of dog tags, which are obtained when you successfully complete a Strike or Stealth Strike, as well as being scattered around in the level.
The game itself is broken up into six different acts. Each act is broken down into a number of levels or parts. In each part, you have one objective to meet before you can proceed to the next part, but finding your way to it is all up to you. Objectives tend to be along the lines of gaining access to a specific area, finding a certain person, restoring power to something, any number of things specific to each area. The saves occur only after completing one part of an act. You are brought to a screen that displays your stats for the level, and are given the option to save, continue to the next part, or exit to the main menu.
Other than this, the only difference in the game is after you complete the first act and jump back to the present day, each level begins with a countdown timer popping up for a short while, ticking down the 48 hours Wolverine has left to find the cure before he dies. Overall, it's not a bad game. Very fun to play and control Wolverine and use his abilities to lay out your opponents. But how difficult is it?
For your generic enemies, there's almost no difficulty to them. They can mostly be dispatched before they even get a chance to strike or shoot you. These enemies can either be human guards (which are the easiest, usually going down in three or four strikes with your claws out) or minor mutant science projects (a bit harder and require numerous strikes, or stronger combos). The one difficulty comes not from the enemies themselves but some potential hiccups in the combat detection. Generally when you enter combat, Wolverine will lock on to an enemy, giving you the chance to try and strafe and avoid their attacks if need be. But sometimes you'll go to strike and you will continue past the enemy, leaving your back exposed to attacks, which doubles as an issue with the slower controls as it can take you a few moments to regain your bearings.
The bosses come in packing a big punch. Their battles last longer as their health bars are just as big as your own, and you generally have to use some of Wolverine's Strike ability to deal more damage at once. This can be tricky (again due to the clunky controls) as you need to line yourself up in a particular spot while your enemy isn't moving, and if you fail to trigger the Strike before they begin an attack, you'll find yourself back to needing to line up again.
Speaking of the Strike ability, leveling up doesn't come as easy as the game's manual and tutorial make it seem. There aren't a whole lot of dog tags scattered through the levels. So your predominant source of these will come from gaining them by using the Strike ability successfully. The downside is you really aren't given a whole lot of opportunities to do so. However the bosses do drop a few of these so it sort of balances out a bit.
The objectives themselves are probably the easiest area of the game. As I said in the gameplay section, each part of each act has an objective. Find an entrance to this area, locate this person, and so on. The levels are fairly linear so you can't get lost. The most diversity in a level is you'll come to a fork where path A is locked so you must go down path B to unlock path A. There are some smaller on-the-spot objectives that can pop up. These don't get very well defined, they don't get added to your objectives screen in the pause menu, nothing pops up on the screen most of the time either, which can be a bit annoying. One in particular happens early in the second act. You cross a gap in a broken bridge while an enemy soldier is trying to get something out of a cargo truck. He slips and falls and grasps on to the end of the bridge, and then a five-second timer pops up on the screen. That's it, nothing telling you if you're supposed to save him before he falls, or make sure he falls before he pulls himself up, or if the truck is about to explode and you have five seconds to get clear of it. Very frustrating and for no reason.
Lastly, while the collectibles (comic books) are purely optional for the sake of the game, if you want to go after all of them, they are extremely difficult to find. While the paths in the levels are extremely linear, there are panels in walls that can be destroyed, hiding secret small rooms behind them, or some objects can be destroyed as well, and this is where the comic books are hidden. While the objects they are hidden in are easy to determine (mostly wooden crates scattered about) the ones hidden in secret areas are difficult to find unless you scour every inch of the levels (or use a guide online).
A decent amount of challenge comes with playing this game, but before I tell you if it's worth it or not, let's look at what was good and bad about it.
- Wolverine's sarcastic wit. It is captured and delivered perfectly in this video game. And to make it even better, they weren't able to get Hugh Jackman to do the voice work for his character in the game, but they got the one and only Mark Hamill who does more than a good job in his voice-portrayal of Wolverine/Logan.
- Pop-up objectives. I'm not against the objectives themselves, what I'm against is the lack of notification. Especially in the instance I mentioned above, with the guard hanging off the bridge. You aren't given a single notification of what to do in those five seconds, and its not enough time for you to try a few things out. So if you don't do it right on the first attempt, you fail the mission and are forced back to the beginning of the level, which is more frustrating when you find out that this small objective comes at the very end of the level. Literally after you save him, maybe another three minutes of gameplay elapses before you reach the end and can save. Why not put something like that at the beginning of the level or in the middle, where if it gets messed up there isn't a ton of stuff to redo to try it again? This is something that definitely could have been done in a much better way.
The Story
The game begins with a flashback to 1968 at the Weapon X facility. Logan is walking along a street when he is kidnapped and brought to the facility and forced to go through the adamantium bonding process. He escapes afterwards and begins fighting his way through the facility to find the man who did this to him. Upon finding the professor, he tells Logan that all of the Weapon X mutants were infected with a virus that would eventually kill them. In a normal human, it would work it's way through their system in about a year, but in a mutant it was unknown how long it would take. Coming back to the present, Wolverine is being looked at by Beast who discovers that the virus will most likely kill him in 48 hours. Professor X sends Wolverine back to the Weapon X facility in hopes that a cure for the virus is still there. Can Wolverine find the cure before it's too late?The Controls
For this game, the controls are very involved in the use of all of Wolverine's abilities. The joystick controls his movement while the C-stick controls the camera angle. A is used for his hand/claw attacks while B is for his kicks. Y is for jumping, and X is the action button for interacting with computers or switches in the game, as well as the Strike commands and special claw attacks, which I will go into more in the next section. The left trigger activates Wolverine's stealth and senses mod (also, more detail on this in the next section), while the right trigger makes him crouch. Lastly, the Z button is used to arm and disarm his claws, or can be double-tapped to manually activate his rage factor.In addition to these, there are numerous combos you can utilize in the game during combat. Any mixture of punching/claw attacking, kicking, and crouching can net you any number of different outcomes from chaining the attacks together.
It's a fun control scheme, and makes excellent use of every button on the controller, however it can be a little clunky and slow sometimes. Otherwise, it is very straightforward and easy to use. Let's see just how it does during the game.
The Gameplay
Wolverine's Revenge is a very linear, objective based, beat-em-up game. As soon as you escape from the lab in the opening act, you are thrown right into the mix, with pop-ups every so often to teach you what you do when the time is right to learn it.The basic combat consists of the player's choice of mixing up Logan's punches and kicks. You can choose to have his claws out or put away, but with them out the damage done is significantly increased. When you take damage during combat, you can utilize his healing factor by withdrawing the claws, and then avoiding damage for a few moments until his health bar starts to refill itself. Above the health bar is Wolverine's rage bar. This begins to fill whenever you deal damage to an opponent, and any prolonged period of not dealing damage will slowly start to drain the bar. Once it begins filling it is green, but after reaching the halfway point it turns red. After the red portion is reached, you can double tap the Z button to trigger his rage ability. In rage mode, Wolverine can move much master, deal even more damage, and becomes almost impervious to damage while this mode lasts. In addition, the rage mode is automatically triggered if the bar is filled up completely.
Outside of combat, Wolverine has his stealth and senses mode. In this mode, time appears to move a little bit slower indicating his heightened senses. You can see footprints for a short while, allowing you to track where your enemies go, you can see scent trails so if someone is hiding around a corner from you, you'll have a bit more of an advantage on them. Heat signatures also are visible, letting you see enemies from a bit further away as well as any landmines that could be hidden underground. Lastly, in this mode, you are able to utilize Stealth Strikes, which are completely silent attacks you can use to take out one single enemy if you've managed to go completely undetected in an area.
The Strikes and Stealth Strike moves come in four different levels. You immediately have access to the first level once you enter the game, and the subsequent levels are unlocked by obtaining a required amount of dog tags, which are obtained when you successfully complete a Strike or Stealth Strike, as well as being scattered around in the level.
The game itself is broken up into six different acts. Each act is broken down into a number of levels or parts. In each part, you have one objective to meet before you can proceed to the next part, but finding your way to it is all up to you. Objectives tend to be along the lines of gaining access to a specific area, finding a certain person, restoring power to something, any number of things specific to each area. The saves occur only after completing one part of an act. You are brought to a screen that displays your stats for the level, and are given the option to save, continue to the next part, or exit to the main menu.
Other than this, the only difference in the game is after you complete the first act and jump back to the present day, each level begins with a countdown timer popping up for a short while, ticking down the 48 hours Wolverine has left to find the cure before he dies. Overall, it's not a bad game. Very fun to play and control Wolverine and use his abilities to lay out your opponents. But how difficult is it?
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
Wolverine's Revenge can be a decent challenge, especially if you're trying to go all in on the game and get perfect scores across the board. From the basic combat to the boss fights, and from the objectives to the Strike system and collectibles, you can definitely expect a few headaches playing this game.For your generic enemies, there's almost no difficulty to them. They can mostly be dispatched before they even get a chance to strike or shoot you. These enemies can either be human guards (which are the easiest, usually going down in three or four strikes with your claws out) or minor mutant science projects (a bit harder and require numerous strikes, or stronger combos). The one difficulty comes not from the enemies themselves but some potential hiccups in the combat detection. Generally when you enter combat, Wolverine will lock on to an enemy, giving you the chance to try and strafe and avoid their attacks if need be. But sometimes you'll go to strike and you will continue past the enemy, leaving your back exposed to attacks, which doubles as an issue with the slower controls as it can take you a few moments to regain your bearings.
The bosses come in packing a big punch. Their battles last longer as their health bars are just as big as your own, and you generally have to use some of Wolverine's Strike ability to deal more damage at once. This can be tricky (again due to the clunky controls) as you need to line yourself up in a particular spot while your enemy isn't moving, and if you fail to trigger the Strike before they begin an attack, you'll find yourself back to needing to line up again.
Speaking of the Strike ability, leveling up doesn't come as easy as the game's manual and tutorial make it seem. There aren't a whole lot of dog tags scattered through the levels. So your predominant source of these will come from gaining them by using the Strike ability successfully. The downside is you really aren't given a whole lot of opportunities to do so. However the bosses do drop a few of these so it sort of balances out a bit.
The objectives themselves are probably the easiest area of the game. As I said in the gameplay section, each part of each act has an objective. Find an entrance to this area, locate this person, and so on. The levels are fairly linear so you can't get lost. The most diversity in a level is you'll come to a fork where path A is locked so you must go down path B to unlock path A. There are some smaller on-the-spot objectives that can pop up. These don't get very well defined, they don't get added to your objectives screen in the pause menu, nothing pops up on the screen most of the time either, which can be a bit annoying. One in particular happens early in the second act. You cross a gap in a broken bridge while an enemy soldier is trying to get something out of a cargo truck. He slips and falls and grasps on to the end of the bridge, and then a five-second timer pops up on the screen. That's it, nothing telling you if you're supposed to save him before he falls, or make sure he falls before he pulls himself up, or if the truck is about to explode and you have five seconds to get clear of it. Very frustrating and for no reason.
Lastly, while the collectibles (comic books) are purely optional for the sake of the game, if you want to go after all of them, they are extremely difficult to find. While the paths in the levels are extremely linear, there are panels in walls that can be destroyed, hiding secret small rooms behind them, or some objects can be destroyed as well, and this is where the comic books are hidden. While the objects they are hidden in are easy to determine (mostly wooden crates scattered about) the ones hidden in secret areas are difficult to find unless you scour every inch of the levels (or use a guide online).
A decent amount of challenge comes with playing this game, but before I tell you if it's worth it or not, let's look at what was good and bad about it.
PROS
- X-Men cast. You get to see a bunch of your favorite mutants from the movies/comic books, especially when it comes to the villain. You get to see a number from Professor X's academy, and you get to take down some of the more well known villains (Sabertooth for one, but that's the only one I'm giving away).- Wolverine's sarcastic wit. It is captured and delivered perfectly in this video game. And to make it even better, they weren't able to get Hugh Jackman to do the voice work for his character in the game, but they got the one and only Mark Hamill who does more than a good job in his voice-portrayal of Wolverine/Logan.
CONS
- Clunky controls. I've mentioned it a few times in the review, and it is that much of an issue. Especially when it comes to the movement of Wolverine himself, or using the C-stick to swing the camera around, there is a very perceptible delay in between what you do and the game responding. This makes for many annoyances during combat or in stealth mode.- Pop-up objectives. I'm not against the objectives themselves, what I'm against is the lack of notification. Especially in the instance I mentioned above, with the guard hanging off the bridge. You aren't given a single notification of what to do in those five seconds, and its not enough time for you to try a few things out. So if you don't do it right on the first attempt, you fail the mission and are forced back to the beginning of the level, which is more frustrating when you find out that this small objective comes at the very end of the level. Literally after you save him, maybe another three minutes of gameplay elapses before you reach the end and can save. Why not put something like that at the beginning of the level or in the middle, where if it gets messed up there isn't a ton of stuff to redo to try it again? This is something that definitely could have been done in a much better way.
