The classic 1992 X-Men arcade game has made its return, this time it’s on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. The game was based off a one off X-Men in 1989 that never materialized into a series not in fact on the cartoon that premiered later on that year. The game therefore is a little different from that famous cartoon with fundamental differences like Magneto is controlling the sentinels. This continues tradition set by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Golden Axe of bringing back old arcade beat ’em up onto your HD consoles. Now the question is if the arcade game survives 20 years of progress or have we moved past 1992 and it’s faults.
The breakdown of the gameplay is pretty simple; the game has three main buttons. You’ve got your jump button, your attack button and finally the button to activate your mutant power. Each mutant in the game has their own unique power however they basically boil down to massive damage to whatever is right next to you. The mutant power is something to be used sparingly since while you gain power orbs as you progress through the levels that let you use the powers for free but if you don’t have anymore left to use the powers it instead take off bars of 3 health from your character every time you use it. So most of the time you’ll be using your less powerful and more pedestrian fists which doesn’t really setting itself apart from any other generic beat’em up. The single player mode really doesn’t deserve your time, it lasted 45 minutes for me and you have unlimited continues versus a real arcade game killing most of the challenge. After 10 minutes I had to force myself to continue playing the game since it got so repetitive and boring.
Now where the game actually starts to get interesting is when you start adding more players as you see the game supports up to 6 players at the same time. Though with that said supports up to 6 players on Xbox Live but only 4 of those players can be local gamers. For the local coop the game starts to become a lot more fun as you’re playing with friends taunting each other trying to figure out which one you sucks the most. As for the online multiplayer it can rather be hit or miss, at times it can close to perfect, a lot more of time theres this millisecond of lag between what you’re doing which can pretty annoying. It gets especially bad when people are joining and quitting mid-game where it starts to lag badly for about 20 seconds while they’re coming and going. The online gaming is fun but it’s definitely far from perfect unfortunately.
The game looks exactly like what was like in 1992 for better or worse. The graphics are dated but it’s not supposed to be remake but a port of the arcade game. That said it shouldn’t get a free pass because it’s “retro”. The game looks like your early 16-bit console which is bad considering the Genesis came out in 1989 and this isn’t even a console game. The music is only okay but it’s definitely on the same level of excellence as Mega Man 2 and the voice acting is minimal and not even up to par to other 1992 arcade games.
X-Men is 400 points too expensive for my taste. The single player doesn’t have a leg to stand on with no challenge and the online multiplayer is buggy at best. The game’s best quality is the local multiplayer but there you’re limited to playing with just 4 people instead of getting the full 6 player experience of the best arcade version. What you’ve got left is a run of the mill beat’em up with the X-Men license.
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