X-Men Origins: Wolverine Preview - Xbox 360
- March 13, 2009 15:10 PM PST
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Turns out your power animal likes to play rough: Put on your wifebeater and get ready to break a sweat.
Even if the worst injury you've ever sustained was a simple tumble down some stairs, chances are you've wondered why Mother Nature cursed you with a body full of breakables. Even Wolverine can't single-handedly bring mutton chops back into fashion, but the guy sure can dish out one hell of a beating.
Bullets and blows will punch holes in more than just your t-shirt. As you lose bits of flesh, youll start to see the muscle and bone beneath, giving you a clear visual cue that you better find a safe place to regenerate.
Creation Myth
But how did the hirsute brawler come to possess an Adamantium-fused endoskeleton that'd make a Terminator jealous? In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, based on the upcoming film starring Hugh Jackman, you won't need arms as thick as tree trunks to survive the stint Logan spent in the company of William Stryker and Team X. Wolverine will have his share of exploration, climbing, and mini-game diversions to tackle, but tensions tend to run high in short order in this conspiracy-addled universe, leaving the grizzled anti-hero to do what he does best: shred the hell out of anything that gets between him and his own personal brand of-well, justice is probably not the right word.
Wolverine doesn't exactly take the high road when it comes to cruel and unusual punishment, and it's precisely that flavor of barely controlled fury that the developers of X-Men Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance are drilling into their latest game. Wolverine's main combat assets are his lightning reflexes, rippling and regenerating powerhouse physique, and the half-dozen pieces of razor-sharp cutlery he can summon forth from his clenched fists, but it's his creative use of those blessings that makes him an artist when it comes to kicking ass.
You can ride and wreck helicopters without resorting to seatbelts or firearms, and even hop between them like theyre stones in a pond on his way to the next brawl.
Blood Drive
The controls are simple. Light, heavy, and grab attacks are each assigned a single face button, and combination attacks grow naturally out of them without forcing you to memorize a laundry list of button strokes to bust out the coolest maneuvers. The result promises to be intuitive and flexible control of an unhinged and enormously powerful wild animal on a rampage, uncompromised by the usual hateful battery of family-friendly carnage filters. From the moment your blades snick out and your arms start waving, Wolverine is a tornado of bloodshed and property damage, leaving ragged bodies and destroyed limbs in puddles of coagulating yuck. Pale at the sight of videogame blood? Best you stick to the cooking simulations and sudoku, cupcake.
If you've ever felt ham-strung by the lumbering tempo of too many modern action titles, you're likely to love the rapidity with which Wolverine leaps and tumbles about this dark and gritty militaristic world and tears into deserving villains like Sabretooth and Weapon XI. Speed and fluidity appear to be of paramount importance in Origins, and yet every crisp and detailed motion-captured movement is infused with Wolverine's singular style and personality. Even cooler are the lethal context-sensitive environments that make where you are in the world at least as important as the buttons you pound, whether you're getting hot and heavy in an Angolan jungle or cooling off in a top secret government bunker.
Wolverine moves with such swiftness that he leaves trippy trails of glare hanging in the air along with whatever he carves out of the hide of anyone dumb enough to mess with him.
Personal Growth
Rather than strictly adhere to the film's storyline, Origins crisscrosses with the movie narrative, giving you a chance to explore nooks and crannies that don't enjoy as much time on the silver screen. We don't know whether this arrangement will expose character insights unavailable to film audiences, but we do know that an RPG-style progression system will give you the chance to customize your hero over time. The better you get at combat, the more experience and skill points you earn in the tumult.
Improve core stats like slashing damage and health, or buy up special attacks, finishing moves, and regeneration enhancements. Skate around the room with a furious blizzard of claw-drilling carnage, launch yourself 30 yards at a time in a manic death pounce, and send rockets hurtling back from whence they came. In the comics, some folks are inevitably unhappy with the way Logan gets his results, but there seems little reason why you shouldn't be when you can customize the big guy to suit your preferences, and that gives us great hope that this violent trip down memory lane will be memorable and fulfilling for fans and newcomers alike.
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