X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse

 X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse

I'm a little bit shocked that it has taken me this long to get to an X-Men game, but here we are.

I don't think everyone's favorite team of non-reptilian mutants needs any introduction. The X-Men have been featured in just about every kind of media imaginable, from comic books to Saturday morning cartoons to major movies, the X-Men have been a big deal for a very long time. While most 80's and 90's kids have some familiarity with the cartoon series, and children of the 00's will probably have seen at list one of films, that only scratches the surface of how deep the group's lore goes. Believe me, this iceberg goes deep, you've got alternate universes, pasts, futures, other teams like X-Force and X-Factor, stuff that a hardcore X-Men fan could probably explain to you but is completely over my head. Honestly, I wasn't really a huge fan of the cartoon, I always found it to be an incredibly oppressive and bleak show and it shocks me a little bit looking back as an adult. I know that X-Men dealt with some heavy themes, but it was a lot for a show that ran as part of a children's cartoon block. But you couldn't deny that the X-Men were cool, the variety of personalities and powers were extremely compelling and the world building was excellent.

So, rather than watch the show I turned to X-Men video games. The good news was that there were a lot of them. The bad news is that a lot of them were terrible. Maybe I will play the NES games one day, but I really don't want to. Most of the better ones were on Sega Genesis, I will definitely talk about those at some point. But there was a surprising lack of X-Men games on the SNES and they weren't nearly as hyped as their Genesis counterparts. I had heard of it before, but this is actually the first time I've ever played X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse. Developed and published by Capcom, Mutant Apocalypse is a side scrolling beat 'em up with platforming elements. It's probably more similar to Might Morphin' Power Rangers than it is to something like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. Regardless of how it plays, Mutant Apocalypse was much less fun than any of those games and was definitely one of the more disappointing titles I have played thus far. It's not bad per-se, but it's not really good either.

We will start with the positives, the biggest being the outstanding graphics. It looks and feels like you are playing an episode of the animated series. The backgrounds are bleak, yet also colorful and interesting to look at. The X-Men cartoon always had a weird aesthetic that was both dark and dreary yet also full of color, and the game matches that perfectly. The character sprites are extremely well done, you can see the details on all the characters from the minutia of their uniforms to their comically muscular physiques. Their attacks are well animated and while the enemies aren't particularly interesting, they are at least well animated. Honestly, this kind of added to the disappointment, Mutant Apocalypse really captures the look and feel of 90's X-Men and the fact that the gameplay couldn't keep up was a shame.

The game starts with Professor Xavier briefing the X-Men about their next mission: a raid on Genosha Island to liberate mutants captured by the Sentinels and defeat the evil Apocalypse. Spoiler alert, he's not the only villain involved and it all eventually leads back to Magneto. It always leads back to Magneto. Anyway, you pick from one of five X-Men, Wolverine, Cyclops, Beast, Gambit or Psylocke, to take on one of five levels. You can complete these in any order and once you do, you will have four more levels that are the same regardless of who you choose. The first problems start to rear their ugly head hear, as these levels are incredibly unbalanced. Wolverine's is a walk in the park, while Cyclops and Beast's are absolutely brutal. They are all incredibly boring, it's just move to the right and beat everyone up on a 2D plane, there's no three dimensional movement, with the occasional easy jump mixed in. The enemies will knock you around if you try to fight them straight up, but they will usually just crumble if you attack them low.

All of the X-Men can use their powers, but you need to enter a Street Fighter-style button combo to activate them, which sucks. They are also very unbalanced. Gambit and Cyclops both have very useful ranged powers, but the most difficult parts of their levels to lend themselves well to those powers. Wolverine has the tornado claw attack, which is one of his special moves in Marvel vs. Capcom. An anti-air dragon punch is very useful in a fighting game, it is...less so in a 2D beat 'em up where no one ever jumps. They really did Psylocke dirty, her power is almost worse than her regular attacks because it leaves her open to big damage if she misses. I'm sure I am alone in this thinking, but Psylocke has always been my favorite X-Men character and I hate that she's so terrible here. All of these issues are compounded by how slow the game moves and how much damage you take. Usually in a beat 'em up, you can get hit quite a few times before your life bar is drained. But here, you lose life insanely quickly. If you die, it's back to the beginning of the level. Because you move so slow and combat is such a slog, it's going to take you a while to get back to where you were. Because you take so much damage, you are probably going to die a lot. See the problem here?

Look, I don't think Mutant Apocalypse is the worst game I've ever played. It looks great, has strong presentation and has some cool scenarios. The gameplay isn't even necessarily bad, the controls work fine and everything works as it's intended. It's just that it's all very boring. The fights aren't interesting, the level design is poor, the enemies are all stock and the difficulty is completely unbalanced. The pace is entirely too slow, especially for a beat 'em up. I was always a Nintendo kid, but there were some ways where even I could have admitted the Genesis was better. The fact that it has much better X-Men games was one of those ways (remember, it was the 90's and having good X-Men games was important to kids of the era). I'm not going to say you should avoid X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, because it's not a complete disaster. You could absolutely do worse...but you could also do much better.

5/10