You guys have guts… too bad they're all over the floor.
The problem with movie tie-ins, most notably to summer blockbusters, is that they all tend to suck. Things are the way they are for number of reasons. Not enough development time to polish the game; lack of creative thinking because the game will sell either way if only the movie is successful; or simply because the source material sucks in the first place. After watching "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" at the cinema when it premiered I was really disappointed with how badly the movie turned out especially considering solid quality of X-Men movies trilogy with X2 being absolutely awesome. So what can you make of such a piece of crap of a movie? Apparently Raven thinks nothing less than a great action game and they're right.
The game follows story presented in its movie counterpart but it drops most of the pointless talking and expands on showing a bit more from x-men universe instead. I'll only mention that such figures like Mystique and Sentinels make appereance in the game. Logan, Sabertooth and John Wraith are voiced by Jackman, Schreiber and will.i.am respectively.
Thanks to Unreal Engine 3 game looks really good with dynamic real-time regeneration effects, Wolverine's super vision, nice open spaces and a whole lot of beautiful gore and violence. Logan's character model is very nicely shaped and actually resembles Jackman. Nothing's perfect so there is occasional texture popping typical for UE3 and some framerate dropdowns when too much happens on the screen. Anyways the game gives you great first impression with intense sequence of Wolverine dropping from the sky to unleash his raw power on enemies in the jungle. After that there is about a dozen of hours of hardcore hacking 'n slashing with a fair amount of collecting, upgrading, grinding and simple puzzling to keep you busy.
The game is surprisingly violent. It's unusual to make an M-rated game based on PG-13 movie, hence the so called uncaged edition I guess (for 360 and PS3 versions). Not there is something bad in it. On the contrary, I am very pleased with its uncompromising style. Over the top gory violence feels a bit like Ninja Gaiden II even with the controls but hey, nowadays everything in hack 'n slash department feels like NGII right?
I enjoyed the game very much. It's simple but well designed and it deserves to be recommended even - or especially - if your opinion on the movie is very much like mine.
