X-Men: The Official Game

X-Men: The Official Game Review

The lousy movie-licensed game genre claims another victim in X-Men: The Official Game. Based loosely in-between the stories of the second and third films in the X-Men franchise, X-Men is a completely unremarkable beat-'em-up (with a few boilerplate shooter elements tossed into the mix) that feels just haphazard enough to likely have been rushed through development to get it onto store shelves ahead of the film. It's not that it's entirely broken, mind you, but X-Men's missions are entirely generic and devoid of captivating content, and there are enough annoying little glitches and other obnoxious things prevalent throughout to give the game that thrown-together feel.

There are five home system versions of X-Men currently available, with iterations on the Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PC, and Xbox 360. The first four versions all look comparable to one another, with the Xbox version perhaps looking the best of the bunch. All four really do look practically the same, but the PC, GC and PS2 versions suffer from an erratic frame rate. The Xbox 360 version is actually also comparable to the other four versions--perhaps a little too comparable. To say that on a standard-definition TV, the 360 version looks pretty close to the Xbox version would be an understatement. They're practically identical, with only a slightly more noticeable bit of color depth apparent on the 360 version. Upping to HD resolution does improve matters, especially in terms of environmental detail, but it's not such a huge difference as to warrant the $60 price tag (as opposed to $40 for the other console versions, and $30 for the PC version). Suffice it to say, the 360 version is pretty much a rip-off.

X-Men: The Official Game is ultimately an easily dismissible movie game to toss on the smoldering pile of other cash-in movie games released over the years. Its existence is solely based on the need to have an X-Men game to coincide with the hype surrounding the film, and it brings no interesting gameplay, story, visual, or feature components to the table to make it worth your time. It's all the more disappointing, considering that as of late, Activision has done well with the X-Men license with games like the X-Men Legends series. You'd have to go all the way back to 2002 for something like X-Men: Next Dimension to find a comparably lame use of the X-Men license to X-Men: The Official Game, and trust us when we say that this is not something you ever want to go back to.

Gamespot