“I’m the best there is at what I do. At least the people still living after I’m done doing it say that.”
Movie tie-in games are generally so awful that they are better left in the used bin. There are occasional highlights like King Kong, Escape from Butcher Bay, or the holy grail, GoldenEye 007, but the vast majority of movie games are not worth playing.1 What a surprise then that, of all things, an X-Men prequel film has led to a brutal, bloody beat ‘em up that is true to the comic book character the franchise is based on. While it is a good bit of sadistic fun for a few hours, it begins to feel repetitive, ultimately recycling the same formula too many times to sustain the initial level of enjoyment for an entire playthrough.
The most appealing aspect of the game is that it wasn’t tamed down to perfectly match the PG-13 tone of the film. Instead, the violence is cranked up to the nth degree as the player engages in ruthless combat. The button-mashing combos are nothing new, but rather than controlling a genericized Wolverine that one finds in games like X-Men Legends or Marvel Ultimate Alliance—where a vanilla punch-kick-jump prototype is dressed up with various flourishes to distinguish the dozens of characters on the rosters—the Wolverine of Origins is the lethal terror you always hope he will be in those games. It is a real thrill to wreak havoc as a superhumanly strong and speedy mutant who is virtually indestructible and has razor-sharp claws jutting from the ends of his fists. Limbs are severed, bodies sliced in half, midsections are impaled. Blood flows gratuitously. (The “Uncaged Edition” of the game is even gorier and is rated M.) The best feature of the combat system is the lunge action, which allows you to lock onto an enemy (even one fairly far away from Wolverine) and dive toward them, leading with the claws.
Another really cool feature is that Wolverine’s body visibly takes damage in real time. His skin and muscles tear, revealing the adamantium skeleton beneath it and giving the player an indication of their health level. As your health regenerates, so do Wolverine’s wounds heal before your eyes. As a trivial add-on that somehow brought me more delight than it merits, you can collect little statues that unlock “challenge rooms” where you fight against different Wolverines wearing costumes from various eras of the comics and animated adaptations. Once you defeat a given Wolverine, you unlock his suit for use during the main game.
For the first few hours, the exaggerated combat hits a visceral pleasure center that negates a need for anything more. After the luster wears off, though, the game doesn’t have much else to offer. The cutscenes are excessively brutal2 and the transitions from gameplay to mini-death-cutscene and back to gameplay are smooth, but the repetitious enemies and sparse puzzles leave the engaging combat to do most of the work. And it works, but not for the 10+ hours you will need to sink into the game in order to finish. The locations the player traverses are varied—the Weapon X lab where Wolverine was “created,” the African Jungle, snow covered terrain—but the enemies and puzzles that you encounter in each feel very much the same.
By now you can pick this game up for only a few dollars. Even though it’s derivative of many other third-person hack-and-slashers and gets stale after a while, the game taps into something primal with its viscous combat system, giving it enough of a punch to keep you interested through most of a playthrough. It doesn’t knock the ball out of the park, but it’s at least playing the game, which is a step up from most other Marvel movie tie-ins.
1. I will make a crucial distinction here. There are many games based on film franchises that are good—Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation, etc.—but I am specifically referring to games that come out at the same time as the films they are based on and are used to promote those films, rather than games that capitalize on the success of a film later by making a game for it.
2. For instance, in one of them, Wolverine pulls a helicopter pilot out of his chopper and lifts his head into the spinning blade above them.