X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Optimism was high when Wolverine, everyone’s favourite, ill-tempered antihero, was given his own spin-off, especially after Brett Ratner’s soulless conclusion to the original film trilogy. While prepubescent boys with Spider-Man underwear and all existing Master Chief paraphernalia known to man will relish in the movie’s mindless action and frantic pace, Marvel connoisseurs hoping for something a little more substantial will be thoroughly disappointed. As movie games are already notoriously bad by nature, one would expect the game adaptation of such a subpar film to be especially rotten, but that’s not necessarily the case.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is essentially Sony’s God of War, with adamantium claws where the Blades of Chaos should be, complete with slow-motion air combos and collectible red orbs which emerge from fallen enemies. As a rather straightforward brawler, Logan’s moves all rely on some combination of strong or quick attacks, grabs, or lunges. Lunges are particularly satisfying and useful, allowing Logan to lock on to distant enemies and instantly leap to them. This will not only be the primary method of rapidly dispatching enemies throughout the game, but will also come into play quite often during action sequences. Logan may need to jump from boat to boat by lunging at consecutive targets, or close the gap between himself and a helicopter.

When enemies are shielded or too close to lunge to, Logan can unleash a flurry of claw attacks and combos which will dismember all unfortunate enough to be in his way. Whereas the movie’s violence was watered down due to its 12A rating, the game has no such qualms. Body parts and blood are plentiful, and Logan is certainly not shy about impaling someone he just met, or pulling a helicopter pilot out of the cockpit and decapitating him with the rotary blades. Combo strings are purposely simple to allow anyone to pull off spectacular attacks, but this makes the game somewhat shallow and a bit of a button masher, which ultimately decreases its longevity. Logan can also deflect projectiles or use the environment to dynamically slay his prey, but most of the time a few quick spin attacks will level a room more efficiently than anything else.

Something previous games have inexplicably avoided is Logan’s regenerative abilities, but X-Men Origins sets out to remedy that; players will actually see bullets and blades wear Logan down to the skeleton before his muscle and skin regenerates in real-time. That, combined with superhuman agility and vicious attacks do, finally, make Logan the absolute bad-ass gamers always knew he could be. Although not nearly as cinematic or epic as God of War, Origins does have some extremely exciting action sequences when not throwing wave after tedious wave of enemies at the player. It also sprinkles light platforming and puzzle-solving throughout which feels unnecessary and “game-y”; who wants to use Logan’s claws to climb a wall when there are internal organs to liquefy? Hugh Jackman does a decent job at providing the voice of his in-game persona—albeit a little less guttural than you might expect—but the script and other voice actors are laughably bad most of the time. Even after 12-15 hours of total playtime, Origins ironically does very little to establish a compelling backstory for Logan, or any of the other characters involved. For those who prefer to skip cutscenes and get straight to the killing however, that’s something Wolverine happens to do very well.

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