by the ESRB
X-Men Fans Deserve A Bit More
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I'm not much for comic books, mostly because I never had the time or money to invest in them. Normally I went to the library and picked up a bunch of X-Men comics. So I was rather curious about how X-Men destiny would be.
After I selected the new game and got started, I was blown away with the graphics. Let me rephrase, I was blown away with how bad the graphics were. My jaw hit the floor when I realized that a game just recently released has the same graphics as a Playstation 2. Now graphics isn't what determines whether a game is good or not in most cases, so pushing through the horrible, low budget graphics I kept playing.
I chose the character I liked the best and proceeded to the opening movie where I noticed almost everybody had new suits. Every one of the suits was hideous or ridicules in many ways. After a few moments a giant statue was revealed and then all hell broke loose. After a bunch of chaotic explosions the first bright spot emerged when I got to choose from one of three types of powers. Since I'm a fan of Nightcrawler, I chose the dark matter power.
Progressing through the opening level and learning the pretty straight forward controls, I hit the next major problem, the voice acting. Pyro decided to ask for my help and the only thought I could muster is "What was Marvel thinking?"
Pyro was wearing a red spandex suit with orange blown-back hair and, despite being an American city boy, has an Australian accent thick enough to run into.
The voice acting was just plain awful. Only Colossus, Nightcrawler and Gambit sounded right. I'm nowhere near being an X-Men fanboy, but even I could tell the voice acting was sub par at best.
Also, if you wanted to give your character a upgrade with a suit you're in for a rude awakening. All that's available are other mutants suits, which wouldn't be a problem if they didn't look completely outrageous.
For the most part the combat was just a typical hack and slash so there really isn't way they could screw that up. Mostly it involves just following the beaten path and killing everybody on it. The only drawback I hit was too many unneeded cut scenes.
Also, in a in a boss battle against Gambit, he would jump outside the arena to say one sentence in a cut scene then proceed to re-enter the fray.
While the negatives were racking up at an astonishing rate, there was a bright spot. The character development was stellar and allowed me to mold my characters powers in the direction I wanted them to advance. I got to choose to advance my powers to be more speed-based and have better area of effect attacks.
The final factor, and one that dinged many points, was value. If you find this game for around ten or fifteen bucks then pick it up. Otherwise you'll be wasting your hard earned cash. Taking in all the factors and weighing the pros and cons, I give X-Men destiny a 2 out of five GiN Gems.
Neal Sayatovich loves the twists, turns and scares of a well developed horror game. Contact him at : neal@gameindustry.com.
Neal Sayatovich, Activision, Silicon Knights, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS