X-Men: The Official Game Preview

This generation has showcased its fair share of superhero themed games. Actually, a lot more have released this generation due to all the movies and such. Spider-Man, Hulk, Batman, The Incredibles, The Fantastic Four, they’ve all gotten their own games, most of them just being ok in quality. The X-Men have gotten a few games so far as well. These include both X-Men Legends games as well as X-Men: The Next Dimension and X2: Wolverine’s Revenge. The Legends games were great and the others were decent at best. Now to help end the GameCube’s life cycle, previously thought dead developer Z-Axis is bringing us the final X-Men title. It’s meant to cover the story after the 2003 hit X2: X-Men United and just before the upcoming movie, tentatively named X-Men 3. This game is aptly titled X-Men: The Official Game.

The game’s events take place a few weeks after the potentially disastrous event at Alkali Lake. For those of you that haven’t seen the movie, Alkali Lake was pretty much a giant dam that was busted at the end of the movie. This caused a huge rush of water that almost killed everyone, but the X-Men and Brotherhood managed to escape. The game, however, will introduce a number of new and familiar characters from the X-Men universe. For example, in the first mission you take on Wolverine as he does battle with Hydra soldiers trying to pilfer technology from Stryker’s old base. Later on in this mission, Nightcrawler is charged with assisting Colossus in getting deeper into the same place. Finally, Iceman is called in to stop a nasty enemy from melting an active nuclear power planet.

Actually, X3’s situations aren’t meant to be simply ‘another story’ in terms of the team working together. Members from the actual X-Men movie screenwriters have actually been hired to work on this project, which can only promise an excellent experience. Chris Claremont, script writer, and Zak Penn, screenwriter of the X2 and X3 movies have teamed up for the story of the game. This time around, the story will really mean something for three particular characters. A nice example is the fact that Bobby Drake (a.k.a. Iceman) is continually struggling with the fact that he’s a noob X-Men member. The always aggressive Logan (a.k.a. Wolverine) though, is bent on exacting revenge on whoever may have been involved in the killing of his love interest Jean Grey. If you saw the end of X2, you actually see what happened to her. Nightcrawler is his loveable German self, and he has an immersive role as well. All three of these playable mutants will have their own unique story to tell and dialogue to go along with it.

You may have actually caught that “three playable mutants” and be confused about it. Well that is not a lie on any level. Z-Axis actually wanted to stray as much as possible from all the familiar elements we may have seen in X-Men games past. They wanted to shift their focus to a more specific style of story, and that involved less people. But less people doesn’t necessarily mean less enjoyment. In a quote from them based on the demo, “If we put Wolverine and Colossus in the game together as playable characters…then gamers would probably feel like they’re playing essentially the same thing with different costumes. By concentrating on Nightcrawler, Wolverine and Iceman, no character will play like the other one.” This could be somewhat accurate, as both Legends games had a lot of familiar characters, just different attire.