Let’s Go, Bub - X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition

By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman

I’m going to say it outright, X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged (or simply Wolverine in the case of this article) is a bad game. The game is so bad it doesn’t even deserve an ambiguous opening paragraph that tells you about the game’s history like I normally do. While being bad should have been expected, considering this Wolverine game is based on a movie of the same name; I was actually led to believe that this one might actually be good from what I read in preview articles hyping this game and from the developers’ blogs.

"When I first got to do this in the game, I thought it was pretty cool... By the third or fourth time doing this I was damn sick of it."

“We’re trying to stay away from the typical formula seen in movie based games. We’re also going include parts of the Wolverine story you didn’t get to see in the film” the game’s lead designer stated. Sadly, any bit of innovation they may have included in the game was immediately overshadowed by the poor controls, camera and an overall glitchiness in the game. The game literally went from mindlessly fun beat’em to a broken mess of slopped together code right before my eyes.

"Wolverine thinks he's Solid Snake."

I had read somewhere that the key to making a successful third person game depends on refining the 3 C’s: combat, controls and camera. Unfortunately for X-Men Origins: Wolverine the game basically fails in all 3 regards.

Perhaps I’m a bit naïve, but I honestly thought that the days of truly bad controls were gone. While I understand that some games have bad controls schemes and programming, I never thought they’d reach the extent of those in Wolverine. Not only are the controls unresponsive, but a lot of the button combinations are not very well thought out. For example, when doing Wolverine’s evasive attack (which becomes an essential move towards the end game) you’re to hold both the left and right triggers and press X as you begin to evade. This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that your tornado claw attack is activated by holding down right trigger and pressing X. So if you’re not paying complete attention to what Wolverine’s doing or if you’re being mauled by a horde of baddies (which ironically is the most appropriate time to do the evasive strike), you will more often than not do the wrong move. However, worse than doing the wrong move is not doing a move at all, this happens quite a bit and normally at the most inconvenient times. It got to the point where I would feel the need to strike the trigger buttons on my controller harder than normal to prove that this was an issue with the programming and not with my controllers.

"This was actually my favorite part of the game, since it's very clever... You fight against a group of goons using Agent Zero's sniper scope that's trained on you as the main camera angle."

Though the controls in this game should be a near game breaking problem, they’re actually not. This is mostly due to the fact that the combat is very easy in this game. Of the 13 deaths I faced in my play through, absolutely none of them were combat related (they all consisted of falling off a ledge or running into invisible walls mid-jump). The main problem with the combat is the fact that you’re playing as Weapon X/Logan/Wolverine who is endowed with heal factor (for those of you who know nothing about Wolverine, one of his superpowers is the ability to rapidly heal wounds). This makes every fight in the game (aside from fighting Sabertooth, who also has the heal factor) pretty pointless because you can strike, run, heal, then repeat until your enemies are all slain. The combat is also pretty bad even when you try not to cheat the game. There’s very little “flow” to your attacks and enemies just take too long to strike to death. It came to the point where I wouldn’t even try to duke it out with goons towards the end and would merely throw them off a ledge or perform an environmental kill (ie: tossing them into spikes) just to save time.

The camera angles and focal points could have also been refined a bit as well. While it’s not the game’s biggest problem, it does stand out quite a bit. The game’s use of bad shots and camera angles isn’t really much of an issue, considering you can adjust the camera angle and zoom with the right analog stick. However, some of the default angles used really have me wondering if anyone playtested this or not. I mean, did they really think it was a better choice to situate the camera right behind stacks of debris which obscure most of the action, rather than somewhere that would allow a clear view?

Another problem with the game stems from a mixture between the bad camera and the bad combat system. In the game Wolverine is very dependent on a sort of pouncing move. Not only is it used for doing a quick stealth kill, it also allows Wolverine to travel great distances rapidly and also gives him a way to knock annoying enemies away in large group fights. The move itself isn’t a problem; however, the camera effect that goes along with it is. Imagine watching a movie where every couple of seconds the director takes the camera and gives it a good spinning throw, this is basically what it’s like to watch a pounce heavy fight or one of the weird jump puzzles this game throws at you. This game was one of the only few games I had ever played to give me genuine motion sickness.

"Outside of the Weapon X facility building."

The graphics are pretty well done in this game, but very glitchy. After awhile I could tell you when a cutscene was about to happen based on the weird audio and video skips I’d start getting. However, from a design stand point the visual presentation was pretty well done. My only complaint about the design would be that of “feral senses” mode (a hint mode that leads you to your next objective). Though it was somewhat clever to make your vision like that of a dog’s (or how science thinks dogs see), it does get very annoying playing the game for any amount of time in this hyper contrasted black and white visual mode (and many times you’ll need to remain in feral mode for an extended period of time to advance). The cutscenes are actually from the feature film which was kind of neat, making it that I didn’t need to waste my time watching a movie to care about a game I didn’t like anyhow.

"I really don't remember this part or locale in the game. And I saw this game from start to finish while sober."

The audio in the game is pretty bad. A lot of the voice acting doesn’t make sense, I know Wolverine is a Canadian that’s played by an Australian actor and that’s not a big issue. But I do have problems when a game is set in current times and characters are running through advanced technology plants amongst robots that talk in the stereotypical monosyllabic way. The music is decent and I can only assume it comes from the movie soundtrack, since I’ll occasionally catch music I just fought to in a cutscene.

This truly is a bad game. I have absolutely no idea why I allowed myself to play it from start to finish. I wouldn’t wish this game on anyone, including my enemies (since they’d probably become enraged after playing this and would seek vengeance against me even harder). It really was like I had wasted 12 hours of my life playing this, so I felt the least I could do to not make this a total wash was to write about it as a warning to all of you. If you value your money, time or sanity, please stay away from X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

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