X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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I don't know how it happened: perhaps somebody smudged some ink somewhere, or lazily misread a memo. Maybe somebody crossed the streams. But, regardless of how, Raven's accompanying videogame to Hugh Jackman's latest cineplex adventure, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was designed around an 18 rating. Gratuitous, uncensored and rampant violence oozes from every grizzled, vicious pore. Heads get lopped off, people get skewed on poles, and faces get blasted wide open with shotguns. Facing an elite military unit with a genetically engineered arm, Wolverine rips it off and hits him with it until his head caves in. And there's blood. So much blood. That's the game. The movie's a 12A.

The carnage rarely lets up. Granted, you might occasionally wander into a Tomb Raider-esque area to do a bit of lever yanking and crate pulling, and there's a bit where your powers get taken away for a few minutes. And sometimes you get a few seconds without watching an evisceration due to Wolverine's Kratos-inspired door opening technique. But, mostly, it's singing to the tune of brutal action.

There's a precise focus in the design, which is good. Raven are clearly working to their strict development schedule instead of biting off far more than they can chew, which is what happens most movie tie-in games: just have a quick peek at last year's shocking Iron Man and Incredible Hulk games. On second thoughts, don't. What's been put on the table with X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a tight, linear action adventure game that proudly extols its no-holds-barred violence. There's no open world, sub-quests, deep exploration elements or narrative outside of the compulsory shoehorning of a few choice scenes from the movie. There's just Wolverine doing stuff like leaping onto a helicopter, in flight, grabbing the pilot and putting his head to the rotary blades.

For the most part you flick in and out of Wolverine's present and past, which has a habit of making it all seem a bit muddled, and trot around some nice little environments. Before killing everybody. Sabretooth makes a few compulsory appearances, and you get to fight a Sentinel. Which is not as good a boss fight as you'd like, sadly. It's not ambitious in its scope, but it's going for function over form. It's just trying to be a nice little standard third-person action adventure game. Where you fight mutated African soldiers that run around on fire in the first level.

The fighting mechanics are good. Perhaps a little too good. Holding the right bumper causes Wolverine to lock-on to a target, and if you follow that up with a tap of the left bumper he'll perform a devastatingly powerful lunge attack. It's really more of a colossal leap, causing him to defy all laws of physics and propel himself maybe thirty or forty meters across the air. You can follow that up with a little press of the Y or B buttons, which reels off a finishing move that's more than enough to execute the average foe. It's also quite gory.

Lunging, thanks to the distance you can cover and the high damage output, becomes the default attack, and often the easiest way to get through the game is just to constantly leap from one enemy to the next. It might not be the flashiest way to take down your enemies, but it's certainly the easiest. For those that want a bit more panache than pounce, there's a variety of combos and grab moves that end up in brutal, enemy-specific death animations. Some of them are more than slightly influenced by God of War.

It becomes more complicated as you progress, with the game throwing in more and more enemies that deny the lunge attack it's deadly effectiveness - at least not to begin with. Weaken them a sufficient amount and you can, once again, latch onto their soon-to-be corpse and poke your claws through their brains. Then there are enemies with rocket launchers; you can easily deflect their explosive arsenal. You get larger monsters that you have to get behind and then, unsurprisingly, lunge at. There's guys with shields that have to be stunned before being executed, ninjas who have to be parried, and stealth units who are invisible. At least until you tap a button and turn on your feral senses.

Not content with merely exposing cloaked enemies, the feral senses possess plenty of other perks. They always point you in the right direction, for instance. They illuminate bits of the level that you can climb or just generally interact with. Or if you want the offensive, they show all the areas of the environment where you can impale foes.

In a bid to diversify, they've tossed in some quasi-RPG elements, too. Wolverine levels up as he goes along, giving you access to a pool of skill points and the option to upgrade your health, claws and attacks. Which one do you pick? It doesn't matter: there's an abundance of experience and you'll end up upgrading them all anyway. You get more health with every level, but the number of enemies scale upwards anyway. No matter what level Wolverine is, you never feel like more of a badass than when you started.

But that's okay, because you start the game feeling like a superhero. You decimate foes from the beginning, to the middle, all the way to the end. It's rarely a challenge, at least on normal difficultly, because your health is so quick to regenerate. But, to be fair, that's Wolverine's schtick, isn't it? He was playing the recharging health bar health bar game centuries before Master Chief and Soap McTavish even picked up an assault rifle.

And while its simplicity might prove its downfall, Wolverine's healing factor provides the game's most prominent visual spectacle. The rest of the game is a fairly average looking Unreal Engine affair with a startlingly high amount of frame-rate issues. But Wolverine's model is a particularly deft touch in a game that announces itself with all the subtlety of being hit with a brick: he takes damage. Bullets, cuts, even explosions, cause bits of his own flesh to fly off, with a shotgun blast to the face leaving him looking like something Skynet created. Then it all heals. Skin sticks together, bones get covered and bullet wounds get patched up. Oddly enough, and while I don't remember it being one of Wolverine's powers, even his vest eventually regenerates. He's that powerful.

To give Raven credit, it's all well designed. There are some dodgy sections where the jumping seems a little bit off, but that's about it. It never really performs anything exceptional, but it never languishes in mediocrity either. The combat is fluid and accessible, and the visceral spectacle brings out the adolescent in me.

The problem is it's a one trick pony. The shock of the violence and the speed of the gameplay initially grabs your attention, but it lacks the spectacle to keep itself feeling fresh and inventive, then before long a sense of banal repetition sets in. And you're not even a third of the way through the game. I can't deny that it gives you quite a lot of game for your money, but it also outstays its welcome. But maybe that's a design flaw to be exacerbated by reviewers who have to rocket through the game within a couple of days. Going at it slowly, steadily and in small doses would make the constant repetition less prominent. But that wouldn't mean it's not there, either.

Finally, it deserves some mention for being the first superhero tie-in game I've ever played that's miles better than the movie. The film is dire.

72%

By Martin Gaston