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tvgbox-blog · 8 years ago

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X-Men Reign of Apocalypse (GBA) Review

I personally love digging through the GBA bargain bin of my local game stores. While mostly filled with licensed junk, occasionally I will find a game that sparks my interest. While not a big X-Men fan, the series contains quite a few characters that I think are awesome. There is the bad-ass Wolverine with his deadly claws and the laser shootin’ Cyclops. So when I saw that X-Men Reign of Apocalypse was a side scrolling beat-em up that let me play as both of these characters I thought why not give it a chance. Well what did I think? Read on below...

Graphics

For the most part the graphics in this game are serviceable for the GBA in 2001. While the sprites themselves are a tad on the small side each main characters and boss characters look like they should. The game is colorful and the backgrounds are clean and easy to look at at. You wont find any impressive technical marvels in this game as the stages are your basic paper flat affair. The animations of the characters are fluid and look well done with the exception of Cyclops, his walking and fighting animations are just stiff and unnatural looking. Most of game runs buttery smooth, but on later levels I found some slight slowdown, though nothing unplayable.

Game Play

This is honestly the part where the game kinda falls flat. This is your standard below average beat-em up. Each of the 12 stages is you going from left to right beating up enemies as they slowly move onto the screen. The game has no difficulty options and only comes with a single player and multiplayer co-op and Vs. option. I do not have anyone to play the multiplayer with so I will not be covering that in this review. Though I don’t think the multiplayer would help alleviate any of the issues below.

When starting the game you have your choice of 4 characters: Wolverine, Rogue, Cyclops, and Storm. Unfortunately all of these characters basically play the same. You have both a heavy and light attack mapped to the B and A buttons respectively. You are able to jump using the right bumper, can perform an surrounding attack by hitting both A and B at the same time, and can do an across screen attack by doing a quarter-circle forward + A combo. Each character also has a Mutant Power that can be triggered using the left bumper after a super gauge is filled by beating up bad guys. While each character has their own variation for each of these moves they all function exactly the same.

After clearing each stage, you are given a couple skill points to put into one of three categories, these being: Mutant Power, Vitality, and Attack. These are all pretty self explanatory, I found this kind of pointless and ended up putting most of my points into attack just to be able to take down enemies faster. Occasionally throughout each level health recovery items and special recovery items will drop making dying something that will not happen very happen.

As stated earlier, each stage has you moving from left to right beating bad guys with the occasional mid-boss and eventual end boss to finish out the stage. The AI in this game is, to put it lightly, complete crap. The enemies provide no real challenge mostly just moving towards you asking to be destroyed. The bosses unfortunately are no better. Each boss has at most 3 attacks and in most cases I was able to simply mash my light attack using an occasional super move until they were dead. After the first few stages you have seen basically all of the different enemy types you will see for the entire game. You have some brawler enemies, some projectile enemies and just stronger versions of these two archetypes.

Overall the game play just ends up being boring and unfortunately the story doesn’t do much to help its cause.

Story

Again, I am not a huge fan of X-Men so I can’t say I know much about the X-Men story-line at all. One thing I do know is that this game has basically no story whatsoever. The four X-Men are sent to another dimension by Apocalypse and they need to find a way home. Yup, that is basically it. The story consists of you fighting both old X-Men friends and bad guys, to shut down the portals and get back home. Despite the name being Reign of Apocalypse, he has basically no part in the story at all aside from being the final boss. If you are not a fan of X-Men this story isn’t going to change your mind, and if you are a fan it will leave you severely underwhelmed.

Sound

The best way to describe this games sound is repetitive. There are very few music tracks and they are ‘OK’ at best, your standard drums and guitar riff. There is no stand out music tracks at all.

As for sound effects, they are just terrible. Punches and kicks are just generic sounding and when using Wolverine (the best character in the game by the way...) his claws sound like slapping two knives together.

After a short while with the game I ended up just turning my sound off as it was more annoying than anything else.

Replay-ability

Other than replaying the story with each character there is not much to bring you back. The lack of difficulty settings or unlockables makes this incredibly short game (~3 hours max) not one worth revisiting.

Conclusion

If your a fan of X-Men and find this game for less than $5 it is something that may be worth playing for an afternoon. Otherwise this game ends up being rather bland and repetitive with no real redeeming factors. There are much better beat-em ups to spend your time on.

#videogame #video games #xmen #reign of apocalypse #gba #game boy advance #video game reviews #review

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