Smuggling mutants on your PSP is a great heap of beat-em-up fun....minus a few annoying glitches.
This game is like that parent. And while it may not do a good job of raising you, it WILL give you instant gratification for a while. First of all, it gives you a fun comic booky storyline. Apocalypse is a bad guy who wants to rule the world by weeding out the weakest and having the strongest under his command. Since he's out to destroy the world, the X-muties need to jump in and save the day. But they're not the only ones who don't want to see their world destroyed...oh no. The evil Brotherhood wants in on this saving-the world-action. So the two teams combine.
This is great for nerds because it gives us a huge cast of characters to play with. Guys like Magneto, Toad, Scarlet Witch, Jean Grey, Gambit, Cyclops, Juggernaut, Wolverine....even Iron Man. Plus tons more....and not only that, but on the PSP we get to play with really cool, more obscure characters like Cable, X-Man, Dark Phoenix, Cannonball, and even the wheelchair bound Professor X!
Cool huh?
Damn straight it's cool. Plus you get to use a ton of powers!! Each character has a whole bag of powers you can choose from. Each character gets to use 4 powers and you can have 4 characters in your team...this leads to a big powerful bunch of superhumans who can do whatever they want and get away with it. It's like a mini Bush Administration! Awesome!
Plus, you get to go to some famous X-Men locales, including the Savage Land, The X-Mansion, New York, the Weapon X facility, and Egypt...home of the maleficent Apocalypse.
Also, if you're a comic book geek like me, you'll notice tons of references to the great "Age of Apocalypse" storyline...even some of your costume choices are right out of those comics!
So you might be saying "Wiredscotty, this game sounds like the greatest thing since breathing! Why only a 7.5?" Well kids, the fact is, there are some glitches here. While putting this entire game on the PSP is an amazing accomplishment...and playing with muties on the subway is a great way to not talk to people....the game suffers a bit because it's on the PSP.
First of all, Load times are ridiculous. And trust me, I'm not one to complain about load times. Games are cool because they need to load a bunch of crap so you can play it...deal with it...but on this game, the load times really are incredibly long. So long in fact that you sometimes wonder if the whole game has just frozen. And you wonder that because of another glitch. The game is just downright unbearably choppy at times. Usually after a save or a load, the game just chugs a long for a few minutes and then finally gets the frame rate where it needs to be. This wouldn't be bad either if it didn't happen ALL the time!
That combined with some level designs that are just confusing made me give it the score of 7.5. However, don't let this discourage you from playing the game! It's still a lot of fun. It looks great. There is an astronomical amount of content. And you can look like an even bigger social outcast while playing it at a comic book convention, waiting to have your old underoos signed by Rob Liefeld.
Enjoy!....loser.