X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The best thing about good-looking, regenerating near-immortals is the amount of punishment you can inflict on them out of impotent jealousy. Luckily, Wolverine was born to soak up all the pain you’ve got, and it’s fair to say that Logan spends a good proportion of the game with his gutcage blown open. It’s a savage game; the only thing more violent that the damage inflicted on Wolverine is the rapid and nonchalant dismemberment of everyone he comes into contact with. Mature’s one word for it: absurd and childish are other, more accurate words. But it’s a brilliant kind of ridiculous nonsense that’ll occasionally pull reluctant cheers out of your grown-up neck.

Wolverine is a straightforward action-brawling platformer with a bunch of pressure-plate puzzles thrown in, and it manages to tackle everything it does very well. In terms of combat, it makes no bones about aping the genre leaders. And when you die in this game, it’ll generally be from having your health corroded by a daft accumulation of crossfire, rather than one unit outwitting you. So the first thing you’ll learn, in the endless waves of enemies that attack you, is to close with the lunge attack. This gets you to the enemy without having to jog through a bullet storm.

Once there, there’s juuust enough variety in Wolverine’s attacks (and the enemy’s counters) to stop you feeling like an button-mashing automaton — and enough character progress and development to stop you ever getting bored. A combination of set pieces, platforming, and puzzles break up the fatiguingly relentless action, and there are enough hidden secrets to stop you feeling like you’re in too narrow a corridor. Wolverine isn’t immune from the pressures of time that go with a movie tie-in, as we’ll mention later, but Raven deserve a gentle ripple of applause for aiming so far above the profitable insult that was Iron Man.

Occasionally, you’ll wish the game trusted you more. Take the riot-shielded metal-fisted Goliath soldiers, who turn up half-way through the game. They seem pretty formidable, and part of the fun should be working out how to kill them. Except you don’t get to — tutorial text pops up. Attack out of a dodge, it tells you, like an annoying child who’s seen this movie before. Suddenly, the Goliaths are nothing more than “the ones you attack from a dodge roll, then lunge onto.” The same goes for the Leviathan and the W.E.N.D.I.G.O. mini-bosses — both respond to exactly the same tactic of dodge-lunge-attack-retreat, and both take slightly too long to kill to be entertaining, especially the tenth time around. The battle against four W.E.N.D.I.G.O. prototypes at Alkali Lake has to be some kind of dumb record in the field of re-using former bosses.

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