GamesRelay

Name: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is based on the movie of the same name, the movie itself is an off shoot of the popular X-Men Trilogy of films. Wolverine is one of the most popular X-Man characters (of all comic book characters) so it makes sense that the first spin off should be of the man himself.

At its most basic the game is a hack and slash affair, you control Wolverine (obviously) as he makes his way through the films scenery. The premise behind the game is simple; See bad guy, cut bad guy into small pieces and make him regret his decisions that took his life to the point where he was squaring up to the small Canadian with claws stuck in the back of his hand. Several enemies will come at you at once with a varying array of weaponry, bashing either of the two attack buttons will send Wolverine and his claws furiously flying in their direction and bits of enemy bad guys will fly off in all directions. As time passes and kills amass no moves and abilities will be added to Wolverines cache of destruction, the more kills you make the powerful Wolverine becomes. For every kill you make, experience points are awarded, the more experience points you get the higher up the level chain you progress. The fights you take part in are actually a lot of fun to play, Wolverine can lunge attack to different enemies at the press of a couple of buttons, or you can just manually juggle him between the attackers, as with all hack and slash games your button presses will become manic at some point but you're always rewarded with some good fighting visuals. At the end of a fight sequence the action will slow down and you'll see Wolverine wipe out his last enemy in a slow motion kind of way, this is enhanced when you've pulled off a particularly violent move; if bloody slow motion kills are what you're after you can also force this action by hitting 'block' as your enemy attacks which throws you into a 'counter' move, pressing any of the kill buttons attacks your opponent in glorious slow-mo. No doubt this is a bloody game, various limbs fly off in all directions, as you progress through the game it only gets better, rest assured, this is a title worthy of a Mature, 18+ rating. The sheer amount of ways you can despatch the enemy is tremendous, there are plenty of combos to learn or little tricks you pick up along the way. There are some enemies that can be a bit of a pain to fight for one reason or another, but, there's normally a high ledge you can throw them off to despatch of them easier, and, very satisfying that is to!

It's another game that takes advantage of the Unreal Tournament 3 engine, but, it's probably one of the worst examples I can think of, of a game that does use it. That's not to say the graphics are bad, far from it, they just seem a little generic. The graphics and animation for the main Wolverine character don't have a lot of imagination, while recognisably Wolverine the animation is somewhat stilted, he runs just the same way all the time with a finite amount of frames to his motion. Hell, he even runs up stairs in exactly the same way he runs anyway, forcing him into a wall? – Nah – He doesn't care, just carries on running till you point him in the right direction. The only difference between the way he runs through the game to the way he runs in battle is that his claws are retracted when just running to the next place. Expenses were spared then...

The enemies you face at any given time are mostly the same, there are of course some variations but you can easily find yourself fighting six or more bad guys all dressed the same way and all borrowing animation from each other. It can also get a bit frustrating fighting some of the 'harder' enemies as well. The Predator's are particularly annoying because they'll turn up two or more at a time and you can't really attack those without deflecting there own missiles back to them so you've got to wait for them to do that, and, they aint that clever. Likewise, fighting the Wendingo characters can be a pain, again, there not that clever or hard to beat so you end up performing the same actions over and over again which isn't so bad the first couple of times you meet them, but, you do end up groaning a little when you encounter them towards the end. The background visuals also aren't bad, but, they are also pretty far from great as well, the jungle levels look like jungles but aren't massively varied, like wise the interiors aren't vastly different and if the game wasn't so much on rails then you might easily get lost between rooms, there's not really a lot of room for exploration so luckily that doesn't come into it. On some of the bigger set pieces in the game I also found that it slowed down and I was never really sure if this was on purpose or not, there was a lot happening on screen and it was all very exciting and all that, but, it seemed to jerk more than slow down and looked as though the game was struggling to process all the information on screen... Or, it could have been a special bullet time effect of the game that didn't quite work.