X-Men: Reign of Apocalypse

"Bland and dissatisfying."

What? An X-Men walk-along-beat-em-up on the GBA? Gimme! *afew hours later* Oh... is that all?

While this game is initially interesting and fun, it quickly slows down with it's bland repetitious battling and silly story which provides no motivation to continue shredding hordes of clones. It's really easy, too.
I'm a huge X-Men fan, but even then this simply isn't worth the trouble.

GRAPHICS: 9
By far one of the most outstanding features of this title, the graphics are superb. Very fluent and detailed animations portray the X-Men, with not so detailed graphics for the enemies, but nice anyway. Everything's easy to see and the level of detail is great. The backgrounds are nice I suppose, but what's the point of even looking at them? The playing fields just consist of a flat ground on which you walk, and very occasionally a hazard of some sort to get in your way. The only reason I gave such a high score is because of the quality of the game characters, they're simply that good.

GAMEPLAY: 3
While your character looks cool, and appears to have a nice variety of moves, you soon realise this isn't exactly true. Having read about this game somewhere beforehand, it mentioned the upgrading of characters as to access new moves. I was obviously mistaken, as all you can do is upgrade how fast your special attack charges, and how much damage you do. That's it. So you're stuck with the same arsenal all the way through. Which I wouldn't mind, if it wasn't for the boring gameplay. Walk, attack, walk, attack, dodge extremely slow moving projectile, repeat. Yes, this is a beat-em-up, and that's what happens in all of them, but the variety and challenge of enemies in this game is appallingly crappy. You have your enemies that punch, your enemies that shoot at you, and punch, and some that generally seem to do nothing at all. The boss characters are interesting, only because they're from the X-Men series, as an actually gameplay mechanic, they're nothing more than another enemy with a larger health bar.
There's nothing of interest to make you want to keep playing, except for the desire to beat it so you can just get it over with and never touch it again.

SOUND: 2
Nice music. About 5 other sounds in total appear throughout.

STORY: 1
What am I doing in this Sentinal factory again? I can't remember, oh well, doesn't matter. Keep slugging.
The beginnings and ends of each stage allow for dialouge and story... er, development. Basically, there is no story beyond the premise. ''We have to go here now to do this random task which you won't actually see or have any hand in specifically'' makes up the entirity of the game.

REPLAY VALUE: 3
That's a three for the other three characters in the game to finish it with. I wouldn't bother though. Perhaps playing link-up might be the only redeeming thing. Co-op could possibly be interesting, and versus might be nice for afew minutes. You can play as every main boss you defeat.

OVERALL: 4
There is some obviously solid groundwork in this game, such as the detailed characters, but the game is ultimately just unsatisfying on almost all levels.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/13/03, Updated 02/13/03