X-Men: Destiny for the Xbox360 and PS3 review



This week’s review has a continuing theme from my review of Kameo: Elements of Power. It is a theme of great companies that have fallen. This week, we focus on a company that was popular back in the day, but is now a just a laughing stock amongst gamers, Silicon Knights! Once again, for those who don’t know, they were famous for their horror survival game, Eternal Darkness. It was one of the biggest cult classics back then, even though it doesn’t particularly age well today. After that, they stayed rather quiet, and in 2008 released a game that they have been trying to get out for 10 years, Too Human. The result of this was one of the most disappointing and worst games of 2008. The game was so bad that they had to fire 24 employees. I would like to say they actually got back on their feet and made something good, but NOPE! THEY DIDN’T! They released one of the worst games of 2011 simply called X-Men: Destiny. What is it with Marvel recently having terrible games? Their movie-tie-in games were garbage, Spiderman: Edge of Time was almost as bad as their movie-tie-in games, and now this critical flop? What could have gone wrong? It had a promising setting where you could make your own mutant, but this game is just incompetently made. Bland story, bland characters, bland powers, bland boss fights, bland enemy and level design, and whatever else is bland that I didn’t mention. I swear this is one of the worst games I have ever played and might even beat Alice: Madness Returns and Call of Juarez: The Cartel as the worst game of 2011 for me. I really don’t feel like getting started with this review, but here we go. Oh, and spoiler alert, I’m going to point out bad things throughout this review. 

The story revolves around the choice of playing as 3 different, but overall bland and terribly developed characters. You can choose from two scumbag boys or one just not developed at all girl who are all part of the crowd in a rally to bring mutants and humans to a peace agreement. As usual for these rallies, hell drops by and decides to start destroying everything and trying to kill everyone. This results in the X-Men starting to protect everyone, and the bland character you choose to unlock his or her hidden potential mutant powers. Throughout the game while developing your powers, you meet up with some familiar and not so familiar mutants from the X-Men and The Brotherhood and learn what the heck is going on. What can I say that I already didn’t spoil in the opening paragraph? The story is bland, boring, clichéd, terrible, and no thought was put into it. There is nothing you will care about throughout this entire story when you get to the end.
The gameplay featured in this game is your typical cut-and-paste action game where you fight against bland and boring enemies that you would see in a movie licensed game like Thor or Green Lantern from 2011. The real gimmick though is you get to choose from 3 separate, but bland powers and one power will be your main focus for a lot of your attacks. The other major gimmick, which might be this game’s only high point, is the option to add special abilities from other mutants like Wolverine, Cyclops, Northstar, and others that will give you special boosts like better defense, better attack, and the usual stuff. It gives you a huge amount of customizing, and since you have 3 main powers to choose from, you can do a whole lot with these two gimmicks. You will also be doing little challenge areas where you will usually be teamed up with a different mutants like Pyro, Toad, or Surge to beat up on the cookie cutter enemies. From time to time, you will be going through platforming sections that usually have you grabbing onto rails and running across walls while hanging onto the rails to get to higher areas that lead you to more enemies or mini-bosses. There are major bosses in this game, but they are usually few and far between. You can gain mutant points or whatever the upgrade points are called to upgrade your powers that you gain throughout the game and make your characters stronger. That is pretty much it for gameplay since for some dumb reason, there is no multiplayer…yeah, figure that reasoning out for yourself. An X-Men game with no multiplayer or co-op mode.
The graphics are um…uh…BAD! This looks like a PS2 from 2005 and even then games like the first God of War game look better than this game. The only thing I really liked were the character designs for both Nightcrawler and the giant sentinel that you fight later in the game. Everything looks like garbage, and even HD remakes for games like Resident Evil 4 and Beyond Good and Evil look better than this game. The voice acting fares better, but not by much. Nolan North does a decent job with Cyclops, and Steve Blum, who is now the go-to voice actor for anything Wolverine, does a great job. I think I enjoy Magneto’s voice actor the most, Bill Graves. Everyone else is just forgettable and bland. The music is also not that bad giving an epic feel to otherwise forgettable moments in the game.
Let’s see here, how do I continue through this part when I have basically torn this game apart throughout this review instead of saving it all here? Let’s do a quick checklist of what I already listed as bad. Bad story, bad characters, bad level design, bad combat, and bad boss fights. Well, what else could I say? This is really a cookie cutter action game that has an X-Men paint job. The most embarrassing thing that I had to do while playing this game is I had to keep checking to see if this was ACTUALLY made by Silicon Knights. It only made me more upset that such a high profiled company from the Gamecube era could make such a mediocre action game. I thought it was made by the guys who did that terrible Spiderman: Edge of Time game, Beenox or the Thor movie game tie in. Sadly, it’s true that Silicon Knights haven’t learned from their experience with Too Human, their first major bomb ever for the company. I also felt like the controls weren’t fully polished because I have gotten hit many times because I couldn’t fully defend myself since you can only attack a couple of times before you have to pause for a second. The controls also make platforming clunky since your character, even if you choose the girl, feels like she has weights strapped to her feet. I also feel like the whole customization option and the choice of what mission you undertake in the game doesn’t feel fully fleshed out. There is no consequence if you choose more X-Men or more Brotherhood missions over the other and vice versa. This whole game just feels rushed. I mean, I can understand if they ran out of money or they were under schedule constraints, but that shouldn’t be excusable here since the Canadian Government keeps bailing these hacks out! They keep getting money to hire new talent and such, but nope! They aren’t going to hire anyone new until this game sells 1 million copies. Yeah, that isn’t going to happen, guys. Either hire new help and make a better game like the rumored Eternal Darkness 2 for the Wii U, or just close up because this game won’t sell a million copies.
I am not usually the one to go into these angry review styles, but man, this game is Garbage! Garbage! Garbage! Oh, did I mention this game is pure GARBAGE?! I haven’t played such a terrible game ever since Alice Madness Returns, but give that action game some credit, it had some fun action gameplay and a couple of interesting ideas. THIS GAME however, does not. I can’t believe people are giving this game a 6 out of 10 when that is being too kind.  I change my mind with Alice: Madness Returns being the worst game of 2011. Now introducing the worst game of 2011, X-MEN: DESTINY!!!!!!!!!! Seriously, you could save much more money buying Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and downloading X-Men: The Arcade Game for your PS3 or 360 (literally total cost would be 50 dollars). Silicon Knights, I know you are trying to get back up on top again, but this game isn’t making your case look good with the only decent thing about this game being two character designs I liked and two boss fights with Magneto and the Sentinel, and the somewhat decent mutant power gene system. There is just no soul, and no thought put into this game. They take cues from more popular action games and put no effort into giving this game an identity. How about we review X-Men: The Arcade game next week? It would definitely get rid of the rotten smell and vibe of this terrible game. There are worse games out there, but this game, along with Mindjack and Call of Juarez: The Cartel, are the worst games of 2011.
This game gets a 1 out of 10 and an honored place on my games to blacklist.

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