X-Men Origins: Wolverine – PS3

Hack, slash and gouge people’s guts out with everyone’s favourite mutant sociopath in the latest movie spin-off to hit consoles – X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Let’s make one thing clear right now – I am not a violent man.  I detest violence in all its forms, and have never knowingly inflicted lasting damage on another human being in my life.

That said, man, tearing people to pieces with six, foot-long blades is fun!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the inevitable tie-in with the movie of the same name.  As you’d expect, it puts you in control of Logan, the most popular character from the X-Men franchise, and lets you gouge, rip, punch, kick and stab a variety of enemies in a way that only Logan can.

Have some of THAT

The action takes place across a range of locations – from lush, teeming jungles to the dark confines of the Weapon X facility.  Like the movie, the story doesn’t always flow chronologically, meaning there is a lot of jumping back and forth between locations.  Whereas this device works fine in movies, here it gets a little frustrating, as you feel like you’re going back and playing the same few levels over and over again.

This repetitiveness is actually the game’s biggest flaw.  Not only do the locations quickly feel like old news, but the gameplay suffers the same fate, too.  Gutting a soldier like a fish is a joy the first few dozen times, great fun the next fifty or so, but then it gradually goes downhill from there.

You’ll almost whoop with delight (well, I did) the first time Logan flings himself across a ravine and impales some poor unfortunate waiting on the other side through the face, but when you see him do it for the hundredth time it’s no longer so impressive.

Visually the game is a bit of a mixed bag.  On the one hand you’ve got near movie quality cutscenes and a few stand-out moments of in-game beauty – Logan himself is particularly well drawn and animated, and some of the African landscapes are absolutely breathtaking.  On the other hand, a lot of the locations look hurriedly thrown together, and even some of the other important story characters look shoddily done (Mystique, I’m looking at you).

"Christ! Please... not the balls!"

That’s not to say it’s a bad game by any means.  In fact, it’s easily one of the best movie-to-game adaptations I’ve played.  Yes, it’s repetitive, but even when you’ve pulled off all the moves a thousand times, they’re never less than mildly entertaining.  Yes, the puzzle elements are banal, harking back to early Resident Evil ‘push the box so you can turn the crank and open the door’ type stuff, but they make for an occasionally refreshing break from ramming people head-first onto spikes.

For casual gamers looking for some jaw-droppingly mindless violence, I’d say it’s worth renting for a few nights.  For Wolverine fans, though, it’s a must-have, if only because it’s the first game to show us the full ferocity and moral ambiguity of the character – i.e. it lets us kill a whole lot of people in a whole lot of agonisingly painful ways.  And when it comes to maining and murder, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is by far the best at what it does.