'Wolverine' flawed, but good at what it does

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: May 14, 2009

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Certain games have a tendency to become focused on the big concepts, developing a fairly small number of impressive boss fights or some innovative but rarely used gameplay mechanic.

Recent superhero games have suffered from this problem in some major ways, creating experiences that appear to work well on the broad scale, but simply failing to include much fun on a minute-to-minute basis.

“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” has the opposite problem, and it is a much better problem to have.

The story as a whole doesn’t make much sense. Like the movie, the game takes you through important events in Wolverine’s life prior to joining the X-Men. However, it does so in an extremely and often arbitrarily disjointed fashion. The story can’t seem to decide if it’s a companion to the movie or a bridge between the movie and the comic books, and it ends up lacking the best qualities of both.

Similarly, boss battles in “Wolverine” are generally wretched affairs, tending to offer you one means to victory, often the same process that you used in the last four or five boss battles. Boss battles also exacerbate the game’s tendency toward cinematic sequences, which are rarely worth the loss of player control.

But if the game’s broader strokes fail, it makes the success of small details stand out even more. The experience and character customization system really offers a lot of specialization, particularly early on, and gives you self-designed goals toward which to work. There are puzzles that, while never challenging or subtle, are also not entirely condescending or repetitive, and they do manage to break up the rest of the gameplay fairly well.

Finally, and most importantly, there is the standard combat, which is brilliant in its variety and fluidity. The core idea is this: You can take out a lot of enemies really quickly in a lot of different ways.

Two different experience point bonuses introduced early on explicitly encourage this, and trying to balance speed of dispatch with variety of assault techniques leads to a lot of fun -- albeit brutal and violent fun. Whether you’re lunging from enemy to enemy like an adamantium-boned bird of prey or trying to ensure that every last rusty pipe has someone impaled on it, “Wolverine” definitely earns its ‘M’ rating.

“Wolverine” is far from perfect and has almost no replayability. With that said, the gameplay captures the character flawlessly. It is worth a rent for anyone with a taste for “God of War”-like action games or an affinity for Wolverine.