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Mutually exclusive? In some cases, they can be, but is it the case with this one? The basics should be covered as the first step to finding an answer.

This is a third-person action-roleplaying title with squad-based gameplay, and 1-4 players possible offline or online.

If this looks familiar, it isn’t surprising. This game is a direct evolution of the X-men Legends games, has the same developer and publisher, and uses basically the same formula, streamlined and with a serious graphical upgrade. It may not be technically part of the series, but for practical purposes, it may as well be thought of that way with the regards to game mechanics. The main reason this isn’t called X-men Legends 3 is that it no longer focuses primarily on that particular mutant team and its foes, but rather the Marvel universe in general.

For those who didn’t like the cel-shaded look of the XML games (I include myself in that group), don’t worry; that look is gone, replaced by a more realistic (but still comic book style) appearance which sports much more detail in terms of both characters and environments. Some of the characters still manage to look slightly off to a fan like myself, and I will say that they tend to do a better job with the spandex-wearing characters than the ones with street outfits, but overall they are quite good to look at, making you wish that you could zoom in a little closer during gameplay. The environments are varied and colorful, though cramped at times, and represent many iconic locales in the Marvel universe, from undersea to otherworldly, and plenty in between. The first act in the game gives you a good sampling of this, and is the longest of five (they tend to reduce in length and variety the farther you go).

Since this version is a next-gen title, it sports nice resolution for those with HD displays, HDR lighting, nice shadow effects, flashy power effects (sometimes a little too much so), the works. Some have complained that it doesn’t quite look “next-gen” to them, but I disagree. I think some of these complaints may stem from the limitations of the camera: as I mentioned, it doesn’t zoom in quite far enough to really show off the detail, and things can be a bit of a strain to keep track of when you’ve got four characters zipping about the screen, you’re fully zoomed out, and you’re fighting off a horde of villains, some of whom bear a more than slight resemblance to certain playable heroes.

Speaking of the camera, I’d like to cover that a bit more before moving on. Yes, it’s as bad as you may have heard. Move over, Doom… this camera is a far more fearsome villain than you could hope to be, my friend. I think the problem that caused me to wrestle with the camera the most (controlled via the right thumbstick, by the way), is the fact that it gets hung up on walls and other obstructions constantly, as though it has a physical presence. It then suddenly snaps back when you get far enough away to force it to do so, which can be a bit disorienting. It also refuses to turn properly at times when a wall is in the way, and you may end up having to fight it out in a room that you can’t really see into. It’s like the old effect they have in cartoons, where a big dust cloud is depicted, with the occasional foe being seen briefly as they are hurled into the air, propelled by a hero’s fist or foot. It’d be funny if it weren’t so annoying. It doesn’t make the game unplayable or anything, it’s just a constant thorn in the player’s side.

Starting out: the first thing most players will do to begin with is try out the “New Game” option and choose a difficulty level prior to getting into the action (or go to the Xbox Live option and create or join a new game there instead, but I don’t advise that the first time out, for reasons I’ll get into later).

Difficulty level is an important choice. It’s also good to be clear on what it means with regards to a particular game. Many game developers make the mistake of misrepresenting the actual difficulty levels. For example, you may have noticed how some games offer a rather hard experience on “Normal” difficulty, and “Hard” is more like “Insane to even try” in some cases. Not so in this game; the difficulty levels are aptly named. The default of Normal difficulty is pretty close to what I’d consider normal in a comic book, keep in mind; this means that the rank-and-file minions pose little threat, save for the more elite types, and most of the challenge comes from bosses, with some environment hazards thrown in to make things interesting.

Easy is even more so, and is a good option to consider for those who don’t like controlling a full squad, and would prefer to take a favorite hero or two and run through it that way. You can’t quite get away with that for the entire game, since it is squad-based by default, but there are only a few instances where multiple heroes are required in order to proceed, and you can generally go back and add more to your team when this happens.

A warning regarding easy mode: if you want to retain your progress in all respects (level, items, etc.) at the end of the game, and have the option of starting over in a new difficulty mode with the characters you have leveled up, do not choose easy mode. It does not permit you to start a new game using saved statistics, though any characters you’ve unlocked during play will remain unlocked for a new game, as this appears to be tied to your profile (this goes for outfits as well, I believe).

Hard mode is reserved for those who have beaten the game before, and want a proper challenge for their leveled-up characters. If you’re coming to it from normal difficulty, you’ll have the option of starting in hard mode using your saved stats, items, credits (the currency of the game is S.H.I.E.L.D. credits), etc. Be careful that you don’t sell off items from normal mode that you’d like to keep; you won’t get them again the next time around.

But I’ve kept you waiting long enough. Let’s start the game.

The first thing you’ll be greeted with after starting a new game is a rather impressive cinematic introducing the four characters you’ll be controlling through the tutorial level, and setting the stage for the impending crisis. The characters in question are Captain America, Spider-Man, Thor, and Wolverine, all very well-known Marvel characters, and good choices to start off with, whether or not you’re a fan of them in particular. And if you’re not a fan, don’t worry; you’ll be able to change the team once you get to a S.H.I.E.L.D. access/save point. The opening cinematic does a nice job of getting the excitement going, and showing off the style and attitude of each Marvel hero depicted. They’re responding to a distress call from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s own Nick Fury, whom you will be dealing with throughout most of the game for purposes of receiving missions and briefings.

The story cinematics are quite nice in general, and include some fairly impressive visuals. The mission briefing sequences aren’t as exciting or impressive, of course, but do a decent job of letting you know what you’re up against. The characters involved in these scenes are fixed, regardless of whom your team is composed of. For the most part, the more famed Marvel characters are depicted, but oddly Elektra appears in many of them as well, while more popular and famous heroes than her by far are conspicuous in their absence. Make of that what you will.

Fighting and triggering powers is pretty similar to what many of you are used to from the XML games, with some modifications. The basic combos are a little shorter, because B (the smash attack button) is a chargeable knockback attack when used on its own, and thus can’t start any combos. A similar attack can also be done from the air, though in this case A or B can be used (A is the quick attack button). The usual Triple-hit, Stun, Trip, Knock-Up and Grab/Throw combos and maneuvers are still there in some form, and the Grab maneuver can now be followed by repeated quick attacks to pummel the held foe, or a single more impressive shot using the smash attack. Or, just throw them. X grabs, Y jumps (double-tap for extra distance, or for movement powers). The right bumper scrolls the auto-map. The d-pad switches between heroes, though it is not possible to switch to a hero that is controlled by another player.

The L trigger will call allies to follow you or attack a particular target if tapped, and general tactics can be changed if the trigger is held down.. The AI seems pretty aggressive regardless, but one can somewhat slow their headlong charge at the enemy if defensive tactics are called for. After a limited time, the game will auto-switch back to normal tactics, however.

The left bumper blocks if the hero is stationary, and dodges if in motion. That’s right, we have a block button now. The placement took some getting used to, and there is no option to remap the controls to your liking, but it’s a nice addition that was absent in the earlier games (Block used to be a power). Some like to brag that they never use block, but I used it, and found it handy.

The R trigger is held down in order to use powers, in conjunction with the face buttons, with one power assigned to each. These selections can be changed in the menu, or hot-swapped by using the d-pad while RT is held.

The power selection is a bit more streamlined, and each one is more meaningful (and less prone to going obsolete) than was the case in XML 2, which makes swapping powers on the fly a bit easier.

Another item absent from the powers list is the selection of passive powers one might be expecting, such as ones which boost regeneration rate, improve melee or power damage, or offer some other automatic effect. This is connected to a new feature that I’m not too happy about: the passive powers are now tied to which outfit the character is using, and are upgraded via spending currency/credits rather than power points. I am less than impressed, though some people find it to be an innovative new feature. Why? Imagine there’s an outfit that you hate. Perhaps it isn’t well designed, or you just don’t think it looks good, and it isn’t a version of the hero that you’re a fan of. Now imagine that it has the passive abilities that suit your playstyle more than any other outfit. That isn’t fun, it’s restrictive. I’d prefer them to do it a different way next time. Some of the outfits are pretty cool, and occasionally even depict heroes who are technically separate characters. Unfortunately, some are downright goofy, and seem best used for humor or novelty value alone. All but the first generally start locked, and are unlocked in a couple of different ways, the most basic of which is simply playing the character, defeating enemies, and so on. The maximum number of outfits per character is four, and one character that I used had only three (Moon Knight).

As you level up, and gain points to spend on improving powers, you may notice something that you think is a bug. It’s a natural conclusion, given the amount of such problems in this game, but in this case, it’s a feature which differs slightly from the manual’s explanation. The manual states that all characters other than Wolverine get a power point at every level for use in improving powers, and gaining new ones. This is true after 10th level, but prior to that, all characters gain a point at every other level, the same as Wolverine (who never changes from this pattern, due to being a special case).

Wolverine’s powers work a little differently. He has less power points to work with, but they perform double duty in a way; he has a set of powers called Rage powers, and these are each tied to one of his normal powers. When his rage meter fills (through combat), he goes berserk, and the Rage powers become active, overwriting the powers they are tied to. The only way to improve a Rage power (or unlock it) is to put points into the power it’s tied to. It seems to work fairly well in gameplay, and I appreciate the attention Raven put into making characters feel more unique in this game.

Certain powers are built into a character, and are available from the start, such as the Regeneration Factor of Wolverine or Deadpool, or the super-strength of characters such as Thor or the Thing. Same thing with flight. When in the air, a flyer stops regenerating energy, and power costs go up, but it doesn’t actually use energy. Passive powers from outfits can further enhance abilities like regeneration, but they are useful even without that.

Powers tend to be a bit more interactive in general than in previous titles. Often the players are called upon to rapidly press a given button to keep a rapid-fire ranged attack going, or hold down a button to keep swinging an opponent around prior to sending the foe sailing across the room, for example. Many can be charged, for extra damage and additional effects.

Different tasks require different button sequences as well. Disarming a bomb, pushing aside a heavy obstacle, or avoiding a gigantic boss creature’s strikes will all have their own mini-game style components to them. This actually gets a little overused in boss fights, in my opinion, but it’s not too bad.

Characters still have X-treme powers/special attacks that they can access at a certain level, though they work a little differently now. No more collecting tokens to power their use, instead we have a Momentum meter that increases as a character engages in combat. If multiple characters have full Momentum, triggering one’s X-treme power will trigger each of them in a chain, sometimes with bonus effects if certain characters are used (some characters will increase the damage of others in the chain when their power goes off).

Characters: there are quite a few playable heroes and heroines in this game, but I think that too many of them are locked to begin with. In fact, I’d been planning a particular team based on characters which I had heard would be in the game, only to find that three out of the four I wanted were locked to begin with. Still, there is a good variety to be had to begin with, though some characters that I didn’t care about at all were available from the start, which made it all the worse that I had to wait on my particular choices. About 18 were available from the start. Another 7 are locked. Some are unlocked as you progress in the plot, others have special requirements. Fortunately, the ones I was most interested in were fairly simple to get, though I was in act 2 before my custom team was complete.

Two characters have been added to this version of the game as bonuses, Moon Knight and Colossus. I wasn’t too surprised to see Colossus, considering the game’s roots, but was pleasantly surprised when I heard about Moon Knight. He’s the only member of my core team that I was able to start with, by the way. He seems fairly powerful, and has a nice-looking X-treme power.

These two don’t feel as fully integrated into the game as the other characters, though they are fine characters in their own right (I haven’t played Colossus much yet, however). They just don’t have things like unique dialogue in the game (not that I noticed), or special “Comic Book Missions” which can be found throughout the game in disc form for most characters. Some discs can also be found containing “Vs.” missions, which feature fights against various villains.

This is another bonus content area, as this version of the game has five more of these villain mission discs than usual. The villain fights don’t get you any special bonuses, but the hero missions contain rewards for the particular hero involved, including stat bonuses, an extra power point, and an unlockable outfit.

The comic book missions seem to vary in difficulty from character to character, and it also depends on when you decide to undertake them. What might have been a reasonable challenge at level five or ten can be an agonizing exercise in frustration at level forty, when attempting a mission with a character you’ve rarely played, and aren’t used to. You see, the enemies on these simulated missions will scale with your characters depending on level. Sounds fair, right? However, this is a primarily team-based game. Apparently the scaling system used is the same one that would be used when facing a team (this is just a theory of mine, keep in mind), but these particular missions are solo. The enemies ramp up in toughness and difficulty faster than your characters do when they are fighting alone, and this can make things quite grueling, especially when attempting to complete a mission within a certain time limit, while defeating enough opponents to increase your score sufficiently to gain some rewards. This can be offset somewhat by equipping the character making the attempt with a powerful enough item, but this only goes so far.

A particularly nifty idea that made it into the game is the custom team feature. At a certain point relatively early in the game, The player is given the ability to form a team. This can be a predefined team such as the Fantastic Four, or it can be a custom team complete with a symbol chosen from a list, and whatever name you like (within the space limitations, of course). The downside is that you can never change these selections, though you can change the roster of the team (at a penalty). The team can level up via a reputation point system, gained by defeating major foes and completing objectives. Points gained upon leveling can be used to purchase different team bonuses, such as an increase in health or energy whenever the majority of the team is together, or additional roster slots for added variety in teammates.

As part of the reputation system, sometimes little side quests are offered in the home base area (the location varies throughout), often of a non-combat nature, which will offer reputation bonuses on completion. Some issues I have with these: they start getting offered before it’s even possible to form a team, and if done too early, nothing is gained at all. Also, they are of a rather mundane and petty nature in some cases, hardly befitting a super hero. I mean, come on… do we really care if Mr. Stark misplaced his cufflinks, and does returning them really warrant an increase in a super-team’s reputation? What’s next, doing the laundry?

Players will be given quite a grand tour of the Marvel universe before the quest is over, as I mentioned earlier regarding environments. The game consists of five acts, each one getting progressively shorter and more tightly focused, with the first having the greatest length and variety of scenery and opponents. Many of these opponents are of the inhuman or robotic variety, while the rest are the usual grunt types, presumably so the average player won’t feel bad about beating them up (there are almost no female rank-and-file minions, perhaps as a result of this mentality; a few of the boss-types are, however). Some opponents have a tendency to resemble playable heroes, which can cause problems considering how confusing the action gets at times, but one gets used to it. I feel especially sorry for Iron Man players in this regard.

Mission areas tend to have both main objectives and optional ones, which can affect the ending if they are left incomplete. I ran into an annoying snag associated with one optional objective: since I didn’t attempt it in the order the game wanted me to, it became impossible to complete later. I can’t say more than that without spoilers, though it wasn’t one I cared much about anyway.

I can do without platforming in my action-rpgs, so I was a bit irritated with a couple of sections in this game for that reason. The one that really bothered me seemed a bit arbitrary; one might well be controlling a character with flight, teleportation, or both, but during that section power use is turned off with no explanation, forcing your character to run through it like a rat in a maze. Not a very heroic thing, in my opinion.

There are an excess of bugs, typos, and other developmental hiccups in this game, but I never really encountered anything game-stopping during my play-through on Normal difficulty. It did take me out of the game somewhat each time I noticed something a bit off (and in one case I literally had to quit and restart, before the bug would go away; the boost powers all stopped working until I did). A relatively harmless bug I noticed was associate with items: sometimes they spontaneously developed new bonuses, such as when my “Bulldozer’s Helmet” gained a skill bonus of +2 for one of the Human Torch’s powers. One of the most jarring ones was when an ingame cutscene failed to trigger properly. I went into a room in the current base, started talking to NPC heroes, and realized that they were discussing an event that hadn’t happened for me yet. The cutscene then triggered as I left the room, when it became obvious that it should have taken place upon entry.

The most serious glitch I encountered was associated with unlocking outfits. I had heard reports from other players about unlocked outfits being lost in some cases, and having to be unlocked again, but it hadn’t happened to me until later on, after I’d beaten the game and was messing about unlocking various things I’d never gotten around to. In my case, the problem was that a costume failed to unlock properly when completing the associated comic book mission with a high enough score. I checked the character later, and the correct costume was still locked. Since the mission was considered completed at that point, I was unable to unlock the costume on that save, and ended up going back to an earlier save I had in a different slot (a wise thing to do in a game like this, believe me), and managed to unlock it properly. I am not sure what caused the bug, but I made sure to do it step by step, unlocking the character’s outfits in sequencial order, and never more than one at a time on a given mission in the simulator. That appeared to work fine. I contacted Activision’s tech support system, and after a second attempt in order to get them to actually read what I wrote instead of issuing me a form response based on a common complaint which had nothing to do with my problem, I was told that they were “working on the issue,” and thanked me for my input. I am not sure how confident I am in that response, since they have a habit of not bothering to patch these games, even on systems where such a thing is indeed possible. They never patched X-Men Legends 2, which was fairly buggy as well. Somehow I doubt they’ll patch this one, either, though I hope I’m wrong about that. It could use the attention.

Regarding multiplayer: I recommend playing this offline rather than online, honestly. Online functionality seems rather poorly optimized, and can be frustrating, laggy, and difficult to deal with overall. Many times I attempted to join an ongoing game only to find that “this session is no longer available,” and when I did connect, the connection would often drop before the game even got going. If it managed to hold together, I was treated to a laggy experience, especially when in a session with three or four players. It was not my connection, as I can play other games without such difficulty. Also, I don’t like how it simply uses the host’s save for everything. I’d rather be able to log in with my own version of a character, rather than relying on someone else’s, though I can see how it keeps things simpler that way. Some people have reported smoother experiences than mine, but the majority seemed to be in the same boat. If online play is important to you, rent before you buy, and see how it works for you.

The writing still isn’t great, but they’ve actually gotten better, and the voice acting has improved as well. I like Phil Lamarr’s voicework, so I was pleased to note that he does a couple of voices in this game (one of them is Uatu the Watcher).

So why do I keep on buying these games, and rewarding them for pushing things out before they’re quite ready, seemingly without adequate testing? Well, they’re just a little too fun to ignore. The issues do keep them from being considered truly great games, in my estimation, but these titles by Raven are still good, addictive fun.

If you are a fan of the action-rpg genre, and like (or at least don’t mind) Marvel characters, this is a title worthy of your gaming library despite its problems. Those of you who don’t want to deal with any sort of glitchiness, and don’t feel like bothering with precautions like alternating save slots in case of problems, etc., should probably look elsewhere though, and I don’t blame you at all, believe me. To me, the game is worth it, but everyone has difference tolerance levels, and it’s true that it should not have been released in such an unpolished state. Hopefully Raven and Activision will learn that someday. Failing that, I’ll have to muster the willpower to stop buying their -entirely too fun- games, and I’d rather not let it come to that.