Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

"Marvel takes a twist on the fighting genre"

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects is a fighting game where you fight as Marvel heroes or new EA created characters call the Imperfects. The game is like a mix of a fighting game and a beat-em-up, with huge arenas, a good amount of characters, and lots of explosions. Sounds good so far, right? For the most part it is.

The story in Marvel Nemesis is rather strange. Aliens led by a scientist called Van Roekel start attacking the world and defeating Earth's super heroes, and you must take control of the remaining ones to fight them off. The story unravels through missions in the story mode, and through different viewpoints depending on which hero you decide to be. You learn of the mostly tragic story of the Imperfects, and some secrets about the alien's ultimate weapon. I thought it was pretty well written, but strange.

There are 3 types of missions during story mode. The normal missions vary from destroying a certain amount of objects, defeating all enemies, or guarding things. It's interesting, because you can jump from buildings and explore, and it reminded me of the 3D Spider-Man games. Some missions can be frustrating because you can die easily if you're not careful, or if you miss a jump and get a ring out. Then there are sacrifice and boss missions, which for the most part are the same. In both types you fight a boss, but in if you beat a sacrifice mission with a hero, you can no longer be that hero in Story mode. They are necessary in Story mode though, it's not a big deal. The actual combat is a tad limited. You can attack, pick up stuff, and hold R for special moves. While there's little variety, the combat is still fun. Each hero has different weaknesses and strong points, like Thing is slow, but he packs a punch and can pick up bigger objects than most of the other characters. One problem I've found is that it's all to easy to just keep throwing things until the person dies, or to get quick ring-outs.

The characters include all-stars like Wolverine, Spider-Man, Human Torch, and Daredevil, and they have most of their super powers intact. There's also the new Imperfects. To be honest, I only found about a fourth of them to be cool, and some to be pretty lame(mainly Johnny Ohm. He can use electricity and sound kinda like Elvis, woo.).

The graphics are pretty good, but far from being the best graphics on the PS2. The entire game has voice acting, and most of it's pretty good. The problem is that some of the things they say seem a bit out of character(namely with Spider-Man). The music is good, but there isn't much of it. There's only around 3 or 4 songs in the game! You can hear noises of Spider-Man shooting web, explosions of when you chuck a car at someone, it's all good.

There's tons of replay value. You'll need to replay Story mode at least twice to unlock cards(which give background on the characters and sometimes provide cool art), the origins of the Imperfects, and virtual comic books of the first issues of Ultimate X-men and Fantastic Four. There's a lot of characters and arenas to unlock, but you'll get most of those just by beating Story mode. On top of that, there's a very fun online feature, unfortunately there isn't always a lot of people online, which is a bit sad.

In conclusion, Marvel Nemesis is an odd fighting game, the fighting itself is a bit simple, but has some strange charm that I like. A must have for Marvel fans.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/03/07