Overview- Critic & User
Reviews - Videos &
Screenshots
News- Codes
& FAQs - Gameplay
Controls - Similar
Games
Answers
Bundles
Critic & User Reviews
IGN Review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition
Oh, videogames based on movies based on comic books. To the casual consumer, you're a "must buy" because the movie was awesome, so clearly the game will be even better. To the seasoned gamer, you're a title with more potential for a train wreck than Miley Cyrus at 18. When I first heard that X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- Uncaged Edition would be storming the streets alongside the Hugh Jackman talkie, my eyes involuntarily rolled and a sigh escaped my lips. Would this be another botched gaming opportunity for one of comic books' greatest heroes?
The answer is a definitive "no," accented by an adamantium claw to the face. X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- Uncaged Edition is some of the most violent fun I've had in a long, long time. It's far from perfect, but it's going to be a bloody blast for Wolvie fans.
Watch the video review; you won't believe some of this stuff if you just read about it.
X-Men Origins takes the events of the movie, adds a bunch of back story and tosses you in into the tattered white tank top of the one and only Weapon X. Set before the X-Men films, this game chronicles the time when Logan was running with his commanding officer Stryker and Sabertooth and doing all sorts of disturbing missions, his break from the group, and his one-man mission for revenge. I'm a respectful geek myself, so I'll leave the story elements at that; no need to ruin any of the movie for those of you who have been avoiding the early reviews like the plague.
Luckily, even if I did detail the story, I won't have much to say. This game is all about guttural, disturbing action. Rather than neuter Wolverine like so many games have and leave him with claws that just tickle bad guys, Raven Software has created the most spot-on version of the character we've probably ever seen in a videogame. The title opens with a dramatic movie where Wolverine stabs a guy in the head through a wall, lifts a dude in the air and skewers him over and over again and impales another enemy on an exposed pipe. All of those sick kills are part of your in-game repertoire.
If you've checked out my previews in the past and have seen the occasional screenshot now and again, you need to stop reading and check out the video review above and then the video montage on the next page because you really don't know what X-Men Origins is all about. Until now, Activision has kept the true scope of this game hidden from the public, but with the game on shelves, the cat is out of the bag.
This is one of the most graphically violent games around.
In this game, you're going to behead bad guys, tear people in half with your claws, hack off arms at the shoulders, gut soldiers and shove a man's head into the moving blades of a helicopter. For fans who have scoffed at the number of slices it has taken to drop a bad guy in previous Wolverine games, this is the holy grail. What makes all of these moves impressive is the fact that you can do them pretty much at any time. Sure, there are Rage moves such as a claw spin and temporary damage boost, but you could go the whole game, not use those garnishes and still get the same amount of blood and destruction.
However, above all of these moves on the "Frickin' Awesome Scale" are Logan's Quick Kills. Here, you grab one of your enemies and hit a button. Wolverine will lift the foe into the air, draw back his free hand and when his claw glints in the light, you hit your button again for an instant kill. Those words can't do this process justice. There are a couple of these kills for every type of villain in the game and they're all insane. There's the basic stuff such as Wolverine yanking the dude's head back and burying his claws in the bad guy's throat before yanking down to gut him sternum to scrotum; then there's cooler stuff such as you having to tap a button as Wolverine pushes a bad guy's own shotgun under his chin and pulls the trigger; and then there's the awesome stuff such as when Wolverine goes up against this half-robot looking dude and cuts off his giant metal arm before beating the guard to death with it.
For years, Wolverine has become more and more "kid friendly." This game is a direct attack on that image and it's a totally welcome one.
Adding to the "Holy crap, I'm really Wolverine this time" vibe is how our main character's health works. Once you get past the claws and indestructible skeleton, the one thing everyone knows about Wolverine is that he can heal from pretty much anything. In the past, this has led to crappy games because developers either ignore the fact and give him a health bar or come up with some goofy reason for him not to be able to heal. Here, there are two health bars, but both make sense and were never really an issue in my playthroughs. Basically, the first bar represents Wolverine's exterior. If you can grab some cover when it has been whittled down, it will begin to refill. However, if that bar is completely drained, it means Wolverine has taken enough damage to expose his vital organs. Now, a second meter with a heart on it will begin to take damage. If that one is exhausted, Logan's dead.
Sound dumb? It's not; you'll never even look at the damn things because you're so powerful and a damaged Wolverine looks so cool. See, as bullets fly into Wolverine, the holes appear in his chest and begin to bleed. When a oil canister explodes next to him, Logan's shirt is torn apart and his side is reduced to his adamantium skeleton. The damage not only happens in real time on the four layers -- skeleton, muscle, skin, and shirt -- it heals in real time as well. I can't tell you how many times I'd blow something up when no enemies were around just so that I could zoom the camera in and geek out as Wolverine's skin grew back from its stripped down form.
So when's the other shoe going to drop, right? You're not stupid. You've already seen that I'm giving this title a 7.8, so you're aware that a "But..." is coming to compliment all of this bloody violence. In reality, there's nothing really wrong with X-Men Origins, it's just that it runs out of tricks rather quickly. Like I said, I dug going thought the game slicing everything in sight, but that was pretty much all I did. That's fun and fine, but it's not groundbreaking.
See some Quick Kills without grabbing a controller.
Still, I was high on the fighting, so I'm not really knocking the mechanics of it -- just the implementation. Dragging the combat experience down is the fact that you run into the same kind of enemies over and over -- and I'm not talking about the waves of low level baddies you get to gut. In the beginning of the game, you start off in Africa. After fighting your way through the jungle and battling a bunch of machete-wielding baddies, you come to a hulking beast called a Leviathan. Made of rock, the bad guy has one weak spot on his back. You need to dodge his attacks, lunge to his back, hack at it for awhile and get out before he can grab you. Do this enough times and you bring the big man down. Later on, you'll fight a mutant creature Stryker has created. The creature is gigantic. To beat him, you need to lunge onto his back and hack. Later still, you'll run into the Blob, a massive foe from the comics. As the fatty stuffs his face in a local supermarket, a fight breaks out. To take the big man down, you'll need to lunge on his back and hack.
See where I'm going with this? I even left out the fact that you need to fight a handful more of those Leviathans and Stryker creatures along the way.
Even on the few occasions where you're not fighting a beast whose weak spot is on its back, you're going to be using Lunge. A lot. See, your normal attacks can be blocked and countered with ease, but that Lunge is near unbeatable. When Wolverine and Sabertooth face off for the first time, the fight goes down in a bar. There are a ton of tables to smash through so that you can get Rage orbs and pull off your special moves and the brawl even spills out into a parking lot that's filled with crap to smash and impale Sabertooth with. Problem is, Sabertooth will actually deal out a bunch of damage when you get in close to him, and once you're in, it can be tough to get out. The solution? Lunge. When you land on him, you can get in some cheap shots before he kicks you off. When he kicks you off, he gives you plenty of space to lunge again. Without spoiling anything for movie fans, you're going to fight a couple other mutants who aren't giants and each of them can easily be beaten with the Lunge.
See, the combat looks and feels awesome when you're making mincemeat out of the competition, but when you're lunging onto somebody's back over and over again to only nick his health bar and when you're lunging onto "boss" enemies and they can't counter, the experience loses something.
Swinging back to things X-Men Origins does right, this title features three classic Wolverine costumes. By finding figurines hidden throughout the levels, you'll unlock the classic yellow and blue, yellow and brown, and X-Force costumes. What's cool about this is that after you find the figures, you have to go to a Danger Room-like arena and face off against Wolverine in whatever costume you're trying to nab. Beat that Wolverine and you get the duds. What kind of sucks is that these Logan vs. Logan fights are actually pretty challenging. Lots of times, the other Wolvie would counter my lunge, lunge at me himself, or make use of his own Rage meter and really give me a run for my money. It's too bad that this killer instinct wasn't carried over to the game's other characters.
Beyond that, there's actually a fair bit of Wolverine management to go into if you so desire. As you're tearing people apart, you're going to be earning experience points. When you level up, you get these tokens that you can put towards upgrading your claws, damage and other moves. Similarly, you can find Mutagens -- interchangable, never-ending power-ups -- throughout the levels and will be able to have three active by the end of the game. So, basically, if Wolverine's abiltity to kill everything and heal himself wasn't cool enough at the start of the game, it's going to be a lot better by the end of it. Toss in some hidden dog tags, stats that track stuff like how many enemies you've lit on fire, as well as 250-foot tall Sentinel and you've got some stuff to look forward to.
Sadly, you won't really be looking forward to the graphics in X-Men Origins. It's not that the game looks bad -- Wolverine looks like Jackman, the deaths are grotesque, etc. -- but it never really looks awesome. I dig the layers of flesh growing back, but those layers have a tendency to just look like jelly; the movies in the game are cool, but they don't look like they were compressed right; and texture pop-in happens a lot. Add in some glitches here and there such as claws not lining up with what they're supposed to be impaling, and the game loses some thunder.
Finally, a word of caution: when you choose to start a new game, this erases all of your statistics, power-ups, and unlocked stages. If you're working on getting the Trophy for 2,000 kills and have already beaten the game, you'll have to grind out those final few bodies on whatever difficultly you had started the game on via Mission Select. Don't think that you can start a new game on Hard and pick up your quest to grab a Platinum. If you do this, you loose your progress and scream in the office before having Ryan Clements hold you while you cry... at least that's what I heard from some guy I knew.
©2009-04-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The answer is a definitive "no," accented by an adamantium claw to the face. X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- Uncaged Edition is some of the most violent fun I've had in a long, long time. It's far from perfect, but it's going to be a bloody blast for Wolvie fans.
Watch the video review; you won't believe some of this stuff if you just read about it.
X-Men Origins takes the events of the movie, adds a bunch of back story and tosses you in into the tattered white tank top of the one and only Weapon X. Set before the X-Men films, this game chronicles the time when Logan was running with his commanding officer Stryker and Sabertooth and doing all sorts of disturbing missions, his break from the group, and his one-man mission for revenge. I'm a respectful geek myself, so I'll leave the story elements at that; no need to ruin any of the movie for those of you who have been avoiding the early reviews like the plague.
Luckily, even if I did detail the story, I won't have much to say. This game is all about guttural, disturbing action. Rather than neuter Wolverine like so many games have and leave him with claws that just tickle bad guys, Raven Software has created the most spot-on version of the character we've probably ever seen in a videogame. The title opens with a dramatic movie where Wolverine stabs a guy in the head through a wall, lifts a dude in the air and skewers him over and over again and impales another enemy on an exposed pipe. All of those sick kills are part of your in-game repertoire.
If you've checked out my previews in the past and have seen the occasional screenshot now and again, you need to stop reading and check out the video review above and then the video montage on the next page because you really don't know what X-Men Origins is all about. Until now, Activision has kept the true scope of this game hidden from the public, but with the game on shelves, the cat is out of the bag.
This is one of the most graphically violent games around.
In this game, you're going to behead bad guys, tear people in half with your claws, hack off arms at the shoulders, gut soldiers and shove a man's head into the moving blades of a helicopter. For fans who have scoffed at the number of slices it has taken to drop a bad guy in previous Wolverine games, this is the holy grail. What makes all of these moves impressive is the fact that you can do them pretty much at any time. Sure, there are Rage moves such as a claw spin and temporary damage boost, but you could go the whole game, not use those garnishes and still get the same amount of blood and destruction.
However, above all of these moves on the "Frickin' Awesome Scale" are Logan's Quick Kills. Here, you grab one of your enemies and hit a button. Wolverine will lift the foe into the air, draw back his free hand and when his claw glints in the light, you hit your button again for an instant kill. Those words can't do this process justice. There are a couple of these kills for every type of villain in the game and they're all insane. There's the basic stuff such as Wolverine yanking the dude's head back and burying his claws in the bad guy's throat before yanking down to gut him sternum to scrotum; then there's cooler stuff such as you having to tap a button as Wolverine pushes a bad guy's own shotgun under his chin and pulls the trigger; and then there's the awesome stuff such as when Wolverine goes up against this half-robot looking dude and cuts off his giant metal arm before beating the guard to death with it.
For years, Wolverine has become more and more "kid friendly." This game is a direct attack on that image and it's a totally welcome one.
Adding to the "Holy crap, I'm really Wolverine this time" vibe is how our main character's health works. Once you get past the claws and indestructible skeleton, the one thing everyone knows about Wolverine is that he can heal from pretty much anything. In the past, this has led to crappy games because developers either ignore the fact and give him a health bar or come up with some goofy reason for him not to be able to heal. Here, there are two health bars, but both make sense and were never really an issue in my playthroughs. Basically, the first bar represents Wolverine's exterior. If you can grab some cover when it has been whittled down, it will begin to refill. However, if that bar is completely drained, it means Wolverine has taken enough damage to expose his vital organs. Now, a second meter with a heart on it will begin to take damage. If that one is exhausted, Logan's dead.
Sound dumb? It's not; you'll never even look at the damn things because you're so powerful and a damaged Wolverine looks so cool. See, as bullets fly into Wolverine, the holes appear in his chest and begin to bleed. When a oil canister explodes next to him, Logan's shirt is torn apart and his side is reduced to his adamantium skeleton. The damage not only happens in real time on the four layers -- skeleton, muscle, skin, and shirt -- it heals in real time as well. I can't tell you how many times I'd blow something up when no enemies were around just so that I could zoom the camera in and geek out as Wolverine's skin grew back from its stripped down form.
So when's the other shoe going to drop, right? You're not stupid. You've already seen that I'm giving this title a 7.8, so you're aware that a "But..." is coming to compliment all of this bloody violence. In reality, there's nothing really wrong with X-Men Origins, it's just that it runs out of tricks rather quickly. Like I said, I dug going thought the game slicing everything in sight, but that was pretty much all I did. That's fun and fine, but it's not groundbreaking.
See some Quick Kills without grabbing a controller.
Still, I was high on the fighting, so I'm not really knocking the mechanics of it -- just the implementation. Dragging the combat experience down is the fact that you run into the same kind of enemies over and over -- and I'm not talking about the waves of low level baddies you get to gut. In the beginning of the game, you start off in Africa. After fighting your way through the jungle and battling a bunch of machete-wielding baddies, you come to a hulking beast called a Leviathan. Made of rock, the bad guy has one weak spot on his back. You need to dodge his attacks, lunge to his back, hack at it for awhile and get out before he can grab you. Do this enough times and you bring the big man down. Later on, you'll fight a mutant creature Stryker has created. The creature is gigantic. To beat him, you need to lunge onto his back and hack. Later still, you'll run into the Blob, a massive foe from the comics. As the fatty stuffs his face in a local supermarket, a fight breaks out. To take the big man down, you'll need to lunge on his back and hack.
See where I'm going with this? I even left out the fact that you need to fight a handful more of those Leviathans and Stryker creatures along the way.
Even on the few occasions where you're not fighting a beast whose weak spot is on its back, you're going to be using Lunge. A lot. See, your normal attacks can be blocked and countered with ease, but that Lunge is near unbeatable. When Wolverine and Sabertooth face off for the first time, the fight goes down in a bar. There are a ton of tables to smash through so that you can get Rage orbs and pull off your special moves and the brawl even spills out into a parking lot that's filled with crap to smash and impale Sabertooth with. Problem is, Sabertooth will actually deal out a bunch of damage when you get in close to him, and once you're in, it can be tough to get out. The solution? Lunge. When you land on him, you can get in some cheap shots before he kicks you off. When he kicks you off, he gives you plenty of space to lunge again. Without spoiling anything for movie fans, you're going to fight a couple other mutants who aren't giants and each of them can easily be beaten with the Lunge.
See, the combat looks and feels awesome when you're making mincemeat out of the competition, but when you're lunging onto somebody's back over and over again to only nick his health bar and when you're lunging onto "boss" enemies and they can't counter, the experience loses something.
Swinging back to things X-Men Origins does right, this title features three classic Wolverine costumes. By finding figurines hidden throughout the levels, you'll unlock the classic yellow and blue, yellow and brown, and X-Force costumes. What's cool about this is that after you find the figures, you have to go to a Danger Room-like arena and face off against Wolverine in whatever costume you're trying to nab. Beat that Wolverine and you get the duds. What kind of sucks is that these Logan vs. Logan fights are actually pretty challenging. Lots of times, the other Wolvie would counter my lunge, lunge at me himself, or make use of his own Rage meter and really give me a run for my money. It's too bad that this killer instinct wasn't carried over to the game's other characters.
Beyond that, there's actually a fair bit of Wolverine management to go into if you so desire. As you're tearing people apart, you're going to be earning experience points. When you level up, you get these tokens that you can put towards upgrading your claws, damage and other moves. Similarly, you can find Mutagens -- interchangable, never-ending power-ups -- throughout the levels and will be able to have three active by the end of the game. So, basically, if Wolverine's abiltity to kill everything and heal himself wasn't cool enough at the start of the game, it's going to be a lot better by the end of it. Toss in some hidden dog tags, stats that track stuff like how many enemies you've lit on fire, as well as 250-foot tall Sentinel and you've got some stuff to look forward to.
Sadly, you won't really be looking forward to the graphics in X-Men Origins. It's not that the game looks bad -- Wolverine looks like Jackman, the deaths are grotesque, etc. -- but it never really looks awesome. I dig the layers of flesh growing back, but those layers have a tendency to just look like jelly; the movies in the game are cool, but they don't look like they were compressed right; and texture pop-in happens a lot. Add in some glitches here and there such as claws not lining up with what they're supposed to be impaling, and the game loses some thunder.
Finally, a word of caution: when you choose to start a new game, this erases all of your statistics, power-ups, and unlocked stages. If you're working on getting the Trophy for 2,000 kills and have already beaten the game, you'll have to grind out those final few bodies on whatever difficultly you had started the game on via Mission Select. Don't think that you can start a new game on Hard and pick up your quest to grab a Platinum. If you do this, you loose your progress and scream in the office before having Ryan Clements hold you while you cry... at least that's what I heard from some guy I knew.
©2009-04-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved