X-Men Destiny X-tremely Difficult (Review)

By goukijones — October 15, 2011
Tags: review

Choose your destiny with three different new mutants and powers. Brotherhood or X-Men? Featuring a ton of your favorite characters and an original story. Can this X-Men game do what Batman Arkham City did or do we just have another 90's remake?

X-men Destiny Review

Story

In X-men Destiny you choose from 3 different mutants, who are all attending the same mutant/human rally at the beginning of the game. I choose Aimi, the chick. I don't like watching the dudes walk around in third person games, I'd rather look at some hot graphical ass. Let me tell you, there are a few shots -depending on which suit Aimi is wearing- of that snatch on this chick and its unPWNievable. Ok so, the mutant rally gets attacked. Everybody thinks Magneto is behind it. BTW, Professor X is dead and the school is gone. Cyclops and the White Queen are running the show. The attack happens, you're right in the middle and here we go. Different mutants start asking you for help, like Toad, Surge, Mystique, and even my personal favorite Gambit. Some are literally right around the corner from the last. This to me didn't make any sense in the game. You're up on the streets and Cyclops tells you to go look for Wolverine in the subway or something. You smash through the ground, take 10 steps and Wolverine is right there. Cyclops could have taken two seconds and came down there with me, I did all the hard work of smashing through the street.

The story seems to take place during a few hours, there's no sense of timeline whatsoever. The setting from the city never changes, except for going into a subway or a factory that are all along this linear path. You meet a ton of X-Men and Brotherhood mutants and you can choose to help whoever you like. Brotherhood all the way for me, fuck that good shit. This turns out to be irrelevant as the story goes on. The only difference is that instead of fighting along side Brotherhood during certain parts of the game, I would have done it with X-men instead. Boring. Some fights and side missions you can't get to, unless you do the dialog trees. The dialog trees are UNSKIPPABLE at all times. Some save points will put you before X-tremely long and boring chats with different mutants. Like Colossus, I had to listen and watch that sequence like 20 times.

The voice acting isn't great either. One of those where two people talking to each other, laid their audio tracks separately. So it sounds like taking turns talking into a mic and not having an actual conversation. Mix that in with the strange ambient sounds of the game that would drop in and out depending on who was speaking. I imagine because the developers just cut and paste some of that audio, cancelling out other sounds and I don't know anymore. People don't test shit enough. Steve Blum makes an appearance and voices Wolverine and Pyro. Steve has been the voice of since the show Wolverine and the X-men and is also in MvC3. That's the extent of the excitement for the voice acting in this game.

Gameplay

What you got here is something of a mix between Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Batman Arkham City and Mass Effect. Well that's what I was saying when I first sat down with this game, let me try to explain. MUA was a top down beat-em up. Batman had you bouncing off enemies while you beat them up to raise your combo counter. Mass Effect gave you options on how to level up certain powers. The ME comparison is just a keyword fish. Here's the major problems and I'm only going to comment on playing with Aimi, I don't know how the other characters would have worked or the other mutant powers you're offered at the beginning of the game. You get the option to level up these little 2, 3, 4, hit combos, but wait, that's it, they don't chain with anything else. You get mutant abilities, for shadow/phasing I choose stuff like appearing behind enemies and striking them. You could level that up 3 times with experience you get from Jimmys you beat up. Some of that stuff would chain, but I never got any really high combos until my character was maxed and could just fly around in demon form raiping the field.

I'm starting to lose my mind trying to recall some of this game. The Raptr says I only played it for 9 hours. It seemed like 90. 9 hours is for $60 is a big negative. There might be some replay value here if you wanted to use the other mutants and try out the other powers, but the game is so slow to start. You don't get any cool powers until real late in the game. The enemies all look the same, they all look like Ice Climbers. Then you got the flamethrower Jimmys and the Geth looking ED-209 mechs. Of course zombies, what game doesn't have zombie levels anymore. You do get to fight X-men and Brotherhood mutants and I guess that's kinda cool. Wolverine, Magneto, Pyro, just to name a few. You also get to fight a Sentinel and that's pretty sweet. Some parts of the game look like great ideas, but the overall delivery is a pretty big sad face.

There's no co-op and there's no multiplayer. There isn't much replay value here at all. You can play as the other mutants and with the different powers, but the game is so boring, I don't know if that would justify. I don't want to play it anymore. There's challenge rooms that you can replay through the load screen, but only ones you've opened up in the campaign. Oh and every time you do a challenge room, the game bounces you back out to the main menu and you have to go through a bunch of load screens again. Oh god before I forget, X-Men destiny has the worst save systems I've even seen. The game saves randomly, almost always right BEFORE a long cutscene or chatscene you can't skip and there is NO manual saving. I would have had a completely different experience if I could have saved it myself, hell I probably would have beat the first night.

X-men Destiny is not worth $60 bucks that's for sure. In fact according to the Gouki.com PricePWNr, the price has already dropped below $48 bucks and is currently available for the PS3 at $46.77. I still wouldn't say its worth it. It'll be below $40 soon enough, maybe even below $30 before the holidays. So if you haven't picked up X-men Destiny and still want to play it after everything I've told you above, just wait for the price to drop in a few weeks. X-mode? WTF is an X-mode? Push the left bumper? I never used that move once. Nubfarm.

And Silicon Knights been making games for a long time too.

X-Men Destiny gets a Rent it! From me Jimmy. The game is bland and lacks depth and FUN. As an X-Men fan, I did find some of it interesting and I did beat it on the hardest difficulty. So maybe some other X-Men fans would get a kick out of this game, play it on normal and have a good time. Lets see what the sequel -if there is one- improves, because this game could have some potential. Don't be a Jimmy!

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