Fans of the X-Men comic books will love this fighting game, others will dispise odd controls, and even stranger visuals.
Unfortunetly, the 3D graphics of this game don't carry the same personality of the characters as did many of it's predecessors. The animations of the characters seems to be strange and sub-par, rushed even. The fact of there being one victory stance doesn't help much either. The enviroments of each of the levels has more personality than the characters do, and even then some textures arn't that impressive at all. One plus for the envirometns tho, is that they are all very intereactive. You can smash your opponet into a vending machine, or throw them off a large cliff to a lower level. There are many costumes for each of the 24 characters, about 8 in for each making for 192 costumes in all. Unfortunetley, these costumes are difficult to get and many of them are lackluster variations.
The sound isn't much better than the graphics. The voice actors are fine but lack any real umph to place into the personalities of the characters. However some sound effects don't make much sense. For example when Nightcrawler uses his teleportation ability you hear what sounds like a bird tweet. Another example of this would be the over exaggerated splashing of feet in water.
The gameplay leaves much to be desired as well. The basic storyline is that Bastion, an evil mechanical menace bent on destroying all mutants has been recovered by his own brand of camouflaging sentinals. Unknowingly, Magneto has become a tool for for use under Bastion to recover Forge and use him as an instrument of mutant genocide. I persoanlly have never heard of Bastion before, and was lost as to how he came to get into a secure facility in the first place and what his history with the X-Men was. However, save for that plot hole, the game's storyline is solid and even has a few alternate endings involving Wolverine, Magneto, Cyclops, and Pheonix.
The gameplay is very disappointing though, with controls that arn't very well defined, even in the instruction booklet, and move listings that don't list what occurs leaving you in the dark as to what to do a lot. Equally frustrating is not being able to jump or dodge out of the way of a punch when cornered against enviormental borders.
Those that love the X-Men series of books and TV shows will find this game very pleasing, but those that buy this as a casual gamer will find this very disappointing to the brink of regretting the purchase. The versus mode is just enough to warrant buying this game for the interesting match-ups to be had. "The Marraige Dispute" is a personal favourite of mine: Cyclops versus Pheonix.