Basically Wolverine’s Revenge starts out with our favorite trash talking, hairy mutant Wolverine being infected with a mutant virus. Wolverine has to go back to the Weapon X facility to look for an antivirus for this disease and some answers. The story line is pretty good for a game based on an already failed line of ideas (X-Men characters and bad story lines involving marvel superheroes), and there are a lot of memorable enemies and allies including Professor X, Juggernaut, Sabretooth, etc.

    Wolverine’s Revenge uses a strike combat system that sets up multiple takedowns with one attack which kind of takes away from the fun factor a little bit but it does offer some visually pleasing enemy killing action. You can upgrade your strike system by killing enemies with stealth as in Tenchu 3. The camera angles are a bit of a hassle as well within the game because of bad view plots from the developer plus overly sensitive controls to the camera movements from sector to sector. To make things worse there is quite a bit of lagged, lethargic combat when in the least obvious of lag points in the game.

    The sound isn’t that shabby and I am a real fan of games that use the actual actors’ voices within the game coinciding with the actor and role in the movie, (well minus Mark Hamill as the voice of Wolverine). Sadly there is no support for Dolby Digital sound or wide view formats but this game really doesn’t deserve it anyway. There is a little bit of ambient sound in parts where you can optionally sneak to catch a stealth attack on someone, but it just gets annoying when the terribly strained orchestral music comes to be annoying in the game when there is no need for music. This game seems very rushed and it’s sad because I know if the developers could have spent some more time on this game they could have tweaked out the shaky camera angles and sluggish fights and made it at least a little better than what it is at now. The character simulation is fine but therein seems the problem of polygon collision comes into play which also could have been fixed up if there was only enough time utilized to complete the game.

    Another annoying downside to many gamers comes off as the game being too hard and frustrating due to the fact that there are no checkpoints inside the stages which means when you are annoyingly killed by enemies due to the unbelievable camera angles or the slothful fights you must start the entire stage from the beginning of the stage only to be defeated again by something even more malevolent then the worst of wolverine’s enemies….the game glitches. The game gets oddly frustrating in certain parts of the game where Professor X. tells you (telepathically) that your regenerative powers have been weakened which leads to some infuriating stop-and-go play periods. I would have to say that the most bothersome aspect of the game is the fact that most of the unarmed soldiers are rather proficient in dodging a torrent of adamantium claw attacks from Wolverine with a simple arm block or a leg block. This of course makes an absolute ridicule of Wolverine’s skills and abilities.

    In conclusion I think that the game isn’t nearly as refined as it should have been—however the Xbox makes things a little smoother than you would expect with the GameCube and PS2 versions. The idea of the game and approach of it are good quality but it just feels like the game misses its projected mark by too much. There are too many small, irritating aspects of the game that make it feel like a tribulation to get through. I would not recommend this game to anyone who is hoping for a good game and only to people who generally buy into the X2 hype.