"You might play this game for ten minutes, then you realized that you will never get those ten minutes back."

I had my period in life where I thought that X-Men was the most coolest thing ever. It was a couple of years before the first X-Men film had been released and I had just discovered the cartoon, the actually good game called X-Men 2 on the Sega Mega Drive, and I even read a couple of Marvel Comics. But I lost my interest in them when I was about 15 years old, but I still see Wolverine as one of my favourite heroes, and the rest of the X-Men where pretty cool too. So when I finally got to play this game, I only played it for a couple of minutes and then decided to not play it again because it was really boring. Now maybe 10 years after the last time I've played it, I decided to give it another try just so I could fairly review it.

The X-Men series had a great set of villains. Magneto is often considered to be the best villain in the whole Marvel Universe, Apocalypse is totally badass and I personally thought that Sabertooth was a great rival to Wolverine. So what have these villains done now so that the X-Men has a whole game to conquer? Well nothing, at least the game doesn't tell us anything what's going on. Maybe there actually was a small plot on the back of the game box, but there's nothing at all in the actual game that gives you any reason why our heroes must do this task. I know this is a common thing in older games, but this is a X-Men based game, so a little back story wouldn't have hurt.

When you start the game you first see a quick picture of the six playable X-Men heroes in this game. Wolverine, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Colossus and Storm. Maybe it's the cartoon that have fooled me but doesn't this mean that the game miss major characters like Beast, Rouge and where the hell is Gambit? Even if I don't mind that Colossus and Nightcrawler are there, I thought that they never where any that important characters in the series. But we have just started to name all the things that are wrong with this game.

The first thing you do is to choose if you want to play alone in One Player mode or if you want to play with a friend. Of course in order to play with someone else you also have to have a friend that really wants to play one of the worst games of all time with you, so I'm going to assume that you are going to play this game by yourself if you insist that you must. So now it's time to choose which two X-Men you want to play as and be sure to look at everyone's stats so you know that you get the best team. Yeah you have to choose two X-Men because if you play alone then
the AI controls the other character.

And as I'm sure that you can already guess, this Nes AI is a totally mess. Nothing makes sense about what it does so the sooner that it explodes the better (yeah it seems like mutants explodes when they die. I don't know why I never saw that in the comic.s). You can always switch between the two with the AI, but that is almost suicide to let it control the other character for awhile. For most of the time your partner will still be at the bottom of the screen while you want to get further in the stage. So once the AI is dead, you can finally begin to actually play.

One important thing when you choose your characters is that half of them (Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Colossus) are close combat melee characters while the other half (Cyclops, Iceman and Storm) use their mutant powers to attack the enemies with a ranged attack. Of course this makes the later three far superior to play as, which means that Wolverine is one of the weak characters. This is of course unforgivable and that alone makes it ok to give this game the horrible score I gave it, but I wish that these were the only flaws in the game.

Take a quick look at how the heroes look and you will notice one thing, there are only two different of sprites with just palette swaps. It really is strange that Nightcrawler looks just as strong as Colossus. But that's nothing compared to what the enemies looks like. I could identify one kind of enemy as big metal snakes and there are also deadly bubble enemies, but others just looks like walking blocks and dangerous flying cups. Finally there are these different power up items that the enemies drop some times when they get killed, where my favourite power up looks like a sausage. I usually hate to complain about the graphic on old systems, but what the hell is most of these things really supposed to be?

The game is played on five different overworld maps, which also has to be mentioned just how random they are. It really seems like no one really tried to make the stages interesting, they just inserted a bunch of different random things to make this game even more confusing, and all the different teleports doesn't make it much better. But the goal is to reach a boss at the end of the stage, and to get there you also need to find a key. Of course this is never explained in the game either.

I'm sure that even the boss fights are horrible in this game, but to be honest I could never get this far because not only is the control (just like everything else) in this game really tough to get used to and the game is also really freaking difficult! There are even passages where you have to kill enemies until one of them drops the magical sausage that prevents everything to harm your character, but these don't last long and most of the characters are really slow. When you do die with both of your characters, you get to choose to other and start all over from the beginning of the stage. When these two are dead, you have two more who has to handle the rest by themselves.

If you should be able to complete one stage, then go ahead and choose another one of the four other stages. They are pretty much the same thing over and over again. Now after reading all this I'm sure that you wonder if there really isn't anything positive for me to say about this game? Well maybe there is one thing, and that's that this game might actually be playable if you got a friend to play it with, since then two smart players can use Storm and Iceman which might make the game a little more fun. But if you and your friend wants to play a Nes game together, then there are A LOT of better games to choose from. This game is so awful, that I'm surprised that we usually don't see it on "Worst games of all time" lists more often.

So here's how I will end this review: DON'T PLAY THIS GAME!

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/31/11

Game Release: The Uncanny X-Men (US, December 1989)