Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge

"Not too bad but could've been a lot better"

Many of us were very excited when we first heard that Spider-Man and the X-Men were going to be together in one big game. You have Spidey alongside Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, and Gambit, all against the main supervillain Arcade. But how did such an idea become such a flop in the end?

GRAPHICS 6/10
When you look at the in-game graphics themselves, you can pretty much already see that something was terribly wrong with the game. Having seen many other games for SNES, this game doesn't take much use of the system's capabilities at all. Stages are grimy and show little beyond a 2-D perspective and characters are poorly done and lack detail. Bosses look somewhat better but even they could use a face lift, especially Apocalypse from Wolverine's first stage. If you really want to see some good X-Men and Spider-Man graphics, you're better off looking at the pictures inside your instruction manual or reading comic books.
A few graphical effects are fine. The introductions are done well with a comic book-style strip to start the first level off. Once you get past the first level, you get to see a nice picture of each character as you're picking to see who you'd like to play with. You even get a little profile on each one.

SOUND 9/10
The sound effects in the game are fairly decent. Explosions, optic blasts, cries of pain, and other sound bits are all fairly clear. The only one sound that is completely annoying, however, is the agonizing scream of Storm's underwater death. The music is also well done and fits each stage's theme very well without a problem.

CONTROL 7/10
The controls are easy to learn and you'll be hacking and slashing in no time flat. You don't even have to use the L and R buttons. The only problem, however, is that some characters seems to play very lazily. For example, Spider-Man can swing through the air but he can't swing around continuously. Just one swing and he falls back down. Clearly, the developers weren't big on comic books because any Spidey fan will tell you that he can swing continuously. Another candidate is Gambit, whose main method of attack is to toss kinetic cards. With the exception of Wolverine, each character's attack goes long-range. Gambit, however, throws the cards a short distance and it plops on the ground, which means that if you wasted your cards, you're going to have to find more in order to reload your limited supply.

GAMEPLAY 6/10
When we see the title ''Spider-Man and the X-Men'' most of us were assuming that they were teaming up. Instead, each of the characters play solo adventures without the ability to switch characters in the middle of a stage. This was a big disappointment as some of the stages could really use more than one character's abilities.

A nice feature in this game is the load of familiar characters that show up. For once, Magneto is a no-show but there are loads of other popular faces in the crowd. Famous supervillains such as Master Mold, Apocalypse and Carnage sport their own methods of killing you and while one or two are sub-bosses, most are full end-stage bosses.

Following the tricks and styles of the villain Arcade, the game's stages are surprisingly difficult but interesting. Each stage is designed to test out each character with a few handicaps on their special abilities. For example, Storm loses her ability to fly and she is forced to swim through a giant watery maze filled with enemies and tanks that flood the stage with more water when broken. To make things more interesting, she has no health meter but instead has an air supply that slowly goes down as you swim and get hit by enemies, which means that you're going to have to think twice between smashing one of those water tanks. While this is perfectly acceptable, some of the game's stages just seem ridiculous. Wolverine's second stage pits you against a non-stop Juggernaut that attempts to ram you into oblivion. As you hack and slash him, you may cut down hefty weights that are dangling on ropes above you so that when the big lug hits them, he gets damaged and slows down a bit. Meanwhile, you're also trying to keep a distance by slicing walls and running like hell only to find out that there's a dead end at the end of the stage: a giant ballpit with no place left to run. And by the time you reach it, Juggernaut's still alive and kickin'. Such problems make this game frustrating and less fun to play with each time. What worsens the frustration is that once one of the five characters loses all of his/her lives, the game is instantly over and there's no way to get back to where you were. No passwords, no saves, not even a hidden code.

OVERALL 6/10
With a decent load of interesting stages and many familiar faces, this game isn't too bad and is actually fun but the game is severely crippled by its poor graphics and frustrating gameplay. If the developers had looked deeper into the Marvel Universe and had taken a second look at the game, maybe it would've came out better than it did.

BUY OR RENT
This game has some fun in it but with no backup ability for such a frustrating game, you're better off renting the game for a quick night of gaming.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/05/01, Updated 07/05/01