X-Men (NES)

Comic book week continues!

Difficulty - ****
Controls - **
Sound - **
Graphics - **
Overall - 10 stars out of 20

Professor Xavier's old foe Magneto is on the loose! As the mighty X-Men you'll need all your powers (and some luck) combined to stop him!

This game is pretty hard. One player or two it doesn't matter. You have a choice of six X-Men to play as. And each of them has only one life! Lose all your characters and the game is over! No continues, no nothing.

If you're going to play a 1 player game, good luck. The computer is about as dumb as a sack of bricks. Often it will get surrounded by enemies and blasted into mutant paste! My suggestion, conserve the projectile users (Cyclops, Storm and Ice Man) and have the computer control the hand to hand guys (Colosus and Wolverine).

The controls are pretty straightforward. The 'A' button punches or launches a projectile. The 'B' button jumps. Now, that's not the case for some characters. Some of them don't even get a jump button! How crazy is that? The 'select' button switches between characters in a 1 player game.

While in each stage (there are six of them) there is some music diversity, none of it really stands out. The sound effects are below average at best. Although the title tune is pretty good.

Here's the big problem. The graphics. You would have thought that a Marvel franchise would have gotten the proper video game treatment. Oh no. The sprites are simply blocks with some colours. The enemies are uninspiring and dull, and the terrain is a jumbled mess! You would play thinking that you can walk over some section of the floor when really that's an obstacle! Did I happen to mention that most of the stages are in mono colours? Yep, now its even harder to differentiate what is a wall and what is a part of the floor. Ugh.

While the difficulty is up there game play wise, you'll be muting the sound as its dull and boring. The character sprites are blocky and not very detailed. Although the title screen is nice. The controls are good but the lack of a jump button for some characters is unforgivable! Leave the mutants back at home, this is one time where you want Magneto to win.