Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
Superhero games have been a hit or miss affair over the last forty years, with far more misses than hits, but one of the first sure-fire hits in every way was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The X-Men license in particular was horribly used for decades, with few quality games to its name, largely the Konami arcade game and the two Sega-published X-Men games for the Genesis. The movie series had also seen some ups and downs, with Origins being a largely-reviled film that hurt it, and the game adaptation is a rare case of the game inspired by the movie being far and away better than the film it was based on in every way.
Long before Sony took a chance on Spider-Man with a gripping story, Activision aimed to offer up a AAA-level experience a decade before, using a God of War-influenced combat system and a level of gore that far surpassed what the film and its PG-13 rating were willing to do. Activision went all-out here too, making sure that Raven Software had the tools needed to create something memorable, because in this one adventure, you have a game that not only righted the ship regarding the movie it was inspired by, but put more faith back in licensed games and the X-Men name being used for high-quality games once again.
In this era, the original God of War formula was huge, so action games with light and heavy attacks and a bit of light puzzle-solving became its own sub-genre for a while. Dante’s Inferno was the most blatant clone, while games like Marlow Briggs attached it to an absurd concept for some B-movie-inspired fun. X-Men Origins aimed to find a nice balance of high polish and a gritty, violent story for Wolverine fans to sink their teeth into long before Logan hit theaters and showed the character in a different light. This game was the jumping off point for many actually seeing in real-time the damage that his claws would cause in a battle and Activision wisely started off strong with a trailer showing a head being impaled, setting the stage for the game itself.
Graveyard: X-Men (1992 Arcade Game)
It goes through a variant of his origin story and has light and heavy attacks alongside a killer long-range lunge attack that enables Logan to quickly cover a lot of ground. His giant leap allows him to take out enemies violently with MMA-style ground and pound, and thanks to QTEs, he can deal out damage in big set pieces or take out foes with left and right punches using the face buttons. It’s an intuitive system there with the top-left face buttons controlling the left arm and the top-right button controlling the right arm, allowing for easy pick up and play action across the board.
The organic combat allows for natural crowd-control and there’s even a spin attack that can deal out more damage that’s just in more limited supply because it has a bit of wind-up to it compared to the regular slashes and combos. The combat evokes the speed of a beat-em-up, which is fitting given the franchise’s history with the legendary Konami arcade brawler, but also a more modern feeling of combat depth alongside the earlier God of War games and more versatile combat and far more variety in the set pieces themselves. Being able to leap around from foe to foe is fun, but having environmental areas to kill folks in is a riot.
Death From Above
That aspect of things is reminiscent of beat-em-ups or fighting games like World Heroes with environmental damage being something you’re rewarded for doing. Here you can just lift folks up over your head and slam them into a stake on the ground or into a spike trap on the wall. There’s a lot of variety there and it makes you look for new ways to take foes out in the environments that you may not try otherwise. It’s fun to find a new room and go “well, I could take them all out one by one or find a more fun way to do that…” and find that more fun way with an environmental kill. Having a high amount of variety in how you can take out enemies adds a longer lifespan to the game.
The organic combat allows for natural crowd-control and there’s even a spin attack that can deal out more damage
That also holds true for having diverse environments to fight in. Within a single area, you could experience big set pieces outside or more claustrophobic encounters in a crowded, smaller space. Large areas to fight in allows you to pounce on more foes at the expense of leaving you more open to attack – so it’s a risk vs. reward situation there. Fortunately, the balance on the default difficulty is fair and even when you get hacked to bits by enemies, it’s cool to see since Logan’s skin tears away from his body in various states of disarray, resulting in some disgusting-yet-beautiful scenes you’re not going to see in any other game. Seeing the adamantium skeleton underneath his flesh is one of the most grisly images in a game if you really think about of having so much flesh shot off that you can see organs and a skeleton and yet it’s an image that stick with you.
Speaking of which, the game has held up nicely graphically over the last fifteen years. While the environmental textures are muddy, they’re no worse than what we see now on some Switch games - ditto the jaggy textures and lack of anti-aliasing. The character models look quite nice overall though, with a lot of detail in the main characters and a fair amount of detail in your parade of low-end enemies to slice and dice at will. Animation is also a perfect blend of smooth and rapid - so things like Logan lunging at foes looks organic with a lot of extension on his limbs for the leap and mid-air flight, but then slashing up foes is nice and quick and has a sense of ferocity to it. That fits the character perfectly while still allowing the player to go from foe to foe without delay.
X-Men Origins' sound design is strong. With voice work throughout, you get a blend of high-end voice acting from a quality non-movie cast alongside a soundtrack that fits the action well while still allowing for somber moments to breathe. There aren’t a lot of them, but drama does play out at times and breaks up the non-stop slicing and dicing action well. There aren’t any songs I would single out as being classics that I’d want to hear in any context, but there aren’t any bad songs either – it’s just a great in-context OST and one that blends drama and action well. The sound effect work for the claw slicing may be my favorite bit of audio in the game as a whole since every slash sounds visceral and like it’s cutting through the body rapidly, which is backed up by what you see on-screen.
Unfortunately, licensing may wind up hurting X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s lasting appeal as the game has been delisted from all digital marketplaces and never got an Xbox One/Series backwards compatible version. If you had the game in your Steam library before it was delisted, then it does play easily with modern hardware at high settings and has controller Xinput support baked-in too. I wouldn’t expect a deal to ever be reached for a re-release on consoles, but I could see a short-term re-release happening on PC at some point. We’ve seen that with the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games where you can get them again for a brief period of time and with this game and its movie almost being retro now, I can see a deal being struck to either re-release the original version or do a minor remaster to add more quality-of-life features. It’s a satisfying hack and slash game and one of the best ones in the God of War mold to try and do something different – and having that happen with a licensed property is impressive.
