There's not many nice things to say about X-Men: The Official Game. It's one of those games where, in the pursuit of saying something positive, we'll praise the game for the fact that it properly loads upon the console's activation and provides some type of an interactive experience following that. And hey, Wolverine kinda looks like Wolverine, so that counts for something. But as soon as players take control of Wolverine, that's when things start to go wrong.

Wait, scratch that. Even before gamers get a chance to start playing the game, the horrid cutscenes indicate something just isn't right. Attempting to mirror the X-Men's comic book origins, these cutscenes utilize narrated pieces of artwork drawn in a quasi-realistic style. So as the game begins with a slow zoom on Beast speaking before an assembly, it looks okay. But then, as in a PowerPoint slide, the next piece of artwork appears, a close-up of Beast's unmoving face. And while players fixate on this eerily still, unmoving illustration, the vocalization of the speech continues to emanate from their television. Things only grow worse in later cutscenes, with select moments of animation -- Storm's eyes turning white, Professor X lowering his head -- appearing distinctly out of place. And though we're just talking about cutscenes, which really have no bearing whatsoever on the actual gameplay, the mixed feelings of confusion and raw fascination they bring forth, akin to that of observing a trainwreck, is something that resonates throughout each aspect of the game.

Much like the cutscenes, the first moments of gameplay seem promising at first. Under the guise of a fight between Wolverine and Sabretooth, the game runs players through a brief combat tutorial. But much like the cutscenes, the following segment seems distinctly off. Knocking Sabretooth off the ledge they were fighting on, a fence now separates the two foes. But instead of cutting through the fence and continuing the fight, Wolverine must literally run around the entire island, fighting generic bad guy after generic bad guy in order to resume the Sabretooth fight.

This is problematic for two reasons. From a fanboy perspective, there's no reason Wolverine can't just cut through that fence instead of running around the entire island. But more importantly, from a gameplay perspective, the player has already encountered a multitude of generic bad guys whilst running through a series of same-looking areas. Furthermore, each of these enemies were vulnerable to the same jump-attack combo. Unfortunately, these gameplay problems only become more apparent throughout Wolverine's later segments.

With the Wolverine portion of the game boring and repetitive, there's a lot of potential for the two other playable characters, Nightcrawler and Iceman. Sadly, this potential remains mostly unrealized.

True, Nightcrawler's ability to teleport and perform all sorts of Prince of Persia-esque maneuvers provides for some cool gameplay opportunities. After five minutes, however, the novelty of pulling the right trigger to 'port from ledge to ledge grows a bit old. And just as enemies were always vulnerable to Wolverine's jump-attack combo, Nightcrawler's ability to attack enemies from behind via teleporting means that one need only repeat the same move over and over again in combat. Nightcrawler likewise has a few objectives seemingly aimed at angering fanboys, such as one where he must rush through a stage to help defend Colossus, as by his own admission, the enemy's weaponry cuts right through his armor.

On the plus side, the Iceman segments have Iceman skating through the sky, a nice break from Wolverine and Nightcrawler's ground-based brawling. On the negative side, however, this brings with it a whole new set of difficulties. Portions of Iceman's missions require him to extinguish fires using his Ice Beam, which can be tedious and time consuming. Also, aiming and steering are controlled with the same stick, meaning Iceman can only fire at something directly in front of him, making precise aiming difficult unless he's brought to a standstill. However, this then makes firing on moving targets that much harder, and the worthless lock-on doesn't help. Lock-on offers virtually no assistance, only placing a marker above a target, unlike other games which center the camera around a locked-on target, easing the difficulty of aiming and navigating at the same time.

As if the repetitive and problematic gameplay wasn't enough, not to mention the bizarre cutscene stylings, X-Men: The Official Game also suffers from bugs that can make certain missions impassable without restarting the mission. And although 28 missions may sound like a sizeable number, most are rather short, the total game lasting no more than seven or eight hours.

Lastly, the events of X-Men: The Official Game don't even occur during the X-Men: The Last Stand film the game ties into. Instead, the game is a prequel to the movie, explaining key plot points such as Nightcrawler's absence from the film. So anyone wishing to relive battles from the feature film, often a major factor in one's decision to play a film's official game, is out of luck.