X-Men Origins: Wolverine XBOX Review

Launched in 2009 for the Xbox 360, Windows, and various other formats, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a first-person role-playing action-adventure game based mostly on the film of the same name; even the release coincided with that of the film. For the Xbox 360 version and for Windows, Raven Software developed the game using the Unreal Engine Technology. Origins was launched by Activision.

The player gets to play James ‘Logan’ Howlett (who is codenamed Wolverine) through a series of grueling and challenging highly stylized intense-combat sequences and discover the origins of the much-loved and widely acclaimed character for the first time in a game.

The exclusive Xbox 360 version of the game is popularly called the Uncaged Edition. A major deficiency of the older X-Men games featuring Wolverine was corrected by Activision by creating a gradual-damage system, thus providing the game with a regeneration factor. Wolverine’s injuries are reflected in the character as visible chafing of skin, which will also heal visibly in real-time as you proceed in the game. Skin and muscle, when peeled back, eventually reveal his adamantium skeleton to the gamer. He also possesses enhanced sensory abilities that can be effectively used to solve puzzles, discover hidden passageways, and finding weak spots during combat.

The brilliant prologue happens in what looks like the present or a nearer past (with reference to the X-Men storyline) when Wolverine, in his shredded X-men uniform, is being hunted by a troop of soldiers. His thoughts take us to the distant past.

The game begins in Africa, and the missions take us through the events that lead to Logan’s becoming outcast and his disbanding from Team X, and at the end brings forth his moral dilemma in what all the Team is made to do on Striker’s (the main villain and commander of Team X) whims. In the next part of the game, Logan has settled in Canada with his lover Kayla Silverfox in what seems like a peaceful life. Suddenly, his half-brother Victor Creed appears and is engaged in a fight with Logan, at the end of which Creed snaps Logan’s boneclaws and knocks him unconscious. He wakes up to find Kayla apparently dead. Enraged and hungry for vengeance, he agrees to William Stryker’s offer to join him in exchange of his revenge. He undergoes the excruciatingly painful procedure that melds his bones with adamantium, thus transforming him into an ultimate weapon. But upon overhearing Stryker’s plans to have his memories erased, Logan gets enraged and breaks free from the facility; also killing many of Stryker’s agents in the events that follow.

At the final confrontation with Striker, Logan learns that Kayla Silverfox is alive and that her ‘murder’ was a ploy to win him over as a volunteer for Weapon X. Devastated, he accedes and allows for his memories to be erased. But Creed takes Silverfox hostage and Logan is again in a fight with him, which our hero wins. After this, Stryker sends his Weapon XI, Deadpool, to kill Logan. In the battle that follows, Wolverine wins the fight but his memories are damaged by an adamantium bullet from Stryker’s shotgun.

Combat is marvelously fluid and the combos need not be memorized. You can make grabs and indulge in different kinds of light and heavy attacks. Inspired from Wolverine’s feral abilities, the lunge is a special feature of the fighting experience, which makes for fast covering of the distance between him and his enemies. You can even use the environment and do stuff that includes swinging different objects on your enemies and impaling your attackers on spikes. While in combat, as and when Wolverine’s rage-meter begins to build, one gets to deliver deadlier and more devastating attacks like the claw-spin and enter the berserker mode in which his eyes and claws attain a red glow.

The background score, the sound-design, the graphics, the dialogue, the environments and the lighting have been amazingly combined in this game to deliver the classic Wolverine-touch of the brutal, the savage and the naturally beautiful.

The game is even better than the previous installments in the way that the missions are totally new and more interesting, and in especially how the game is more about the character and the story than just artfully stylized combat and the exciting gore.