X-Men: The Official Movie Game acts as a prequel to upcoming movie, X-Men 3. While there are yet no firm dates for either the movie or the game, we have been told by Activision that they will be released close together. In the same vein as Enter The Matrix, the game is intended to fill in some of the background story behind the movie. Penned by legendary Chris Claremont and Zak Penn the storyline takes places immediately after the events that appeared in the movie X-Men 2. Players will start in the facility at Alkalai Lake which is now ‘haunted’ by Jason Striker who died in X2. Striker appears to have taken some sort of non-corporal hold on the complex and is able to give advice to the characters as they explore.
The first character we saw demonstrated was Nightcrawler. Unexpectedly Nightcrawler does not appear in X3 the movie. Fans will need to play the game to understand the reason for this. Whatever it turns out to be, we’re glad he made it into the game. His unique ability to teleport and disappear makes for some interesting gameplay. Ever since we saw the scene in the first X-Men movie where Nightcrawler teleports around the oval office, dodging bullets and knocking down guards we’ve been itching to see the manoeuvres replicated in a game. Thankfully X-Men: TOMG has done this. Nightcrawler can teleport around enemies, while attacking them. This allows him to avoid attacks and strike from all sides. There is no limit to his teleporting abilities, however he also has a shadow meter that allows him to ‘step into the shadows’ for a limited time in order to heal during fights.
I used to have a coat like that.
Nightcrawler has the ability to ‘cling’ to surfaces. From what we could tell (since we weren’t allowed to touch the controller) this made moving him through his platform like levels a breeze. The demonstration revealed that the gameplay would revolve around objective based missions, occasionally with the assistance of other non-playable characters from the X-Men universe. We were shown that during Nightcrawler’s time in the Alkalai Lake facility he helps Colossus activate a nuclear generator.
The second character demoed was Wolverine. We get the feeling that Z-Axis would have liked to have included a different character instead of the now almost cliché Wolverine. After the disaster that was Wolverine's Revenge we know he has left a sour taste in a few gamers mouths. His traditional hack and slash gameplay seems to be something the developers wanted to avoid. However Wolverine’s huge fan base means that leaving him out would be a financial liability.
Also in Alkalai Lake we saw Wolverine fighting Hydra agents in a training level. In addition to slashing, he has a rage meter that allows him to go into ‘berserker mode’ once fully powered. This lets him to pull off more powerful moves such as the ‘pounce’. To measure health he has two more meters – one for short term and one long term. The short term health will decrease and increase much more quickly, but only up to a maximum equal to the long term health. This means that players will need to stay out of the action for a while to allow the long term health to recharge.
Phallic imagery ahoy.
The final character of the trio, Iceman, has an entirely different style of play to the other two. Iceman only ever moves about on his ice slide. The slide appears under his feat in whichever direction he points his body. This makes moving him through his levels more akin to flying than sliding. You can control Iceman’s speed so that he can slow to a virtual crawl while targeting enemies. All the characters will have specially designed levels to suit their abilities. We saw Iceman ‘sliding’ around the outside of a large nuclear power plant. Wrapped around one of the steam towers was a giant fire serpent which he was required to take down before the plant was destroyed. In a later build of the game we wouldn’t be surprised to see some more linear levels, where Iceman would be required to travel down a path and dodge obstacles – arcade style.
The script for the game is reportedly twice as long as that for the movie. Backed by great writing talent, we may actually see a game-movie tie in that works. In addition to the Alkalai Lake facility and the Iceman’s reactor level, Activision informed us that other levels would include the Statue of Liberty (X1) and Dark Cerebro (X2). We look forward to seeing how the final product pans out. Don't forget to check out our media panel for an extensive set of screenshots.
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