Although its nice to know what happened to nightcrawler, this game is flawed beyond belief.
Unfortunatly this cant be said for xmen: the official game, a title that has the distinction of being the worst game i have ever played. Yes friends this is a title that devoid of any real imagination or indeed, effort. It starts off on a good musical note, with the exact theme from the movies playing in the background as you select your menu options and start the game. Things go down hill quickly from there though.
Within the first few minutes, it devolves into mindless button mashing, with the same attack animations from wolverine as he slices and dices his way through not very nice looking clone enemies solidily for ages until finally meeting up the boss and doing the same thing.
Progress allows you to unlock the nightcrawler and iceman missions, which to be fair are alot less repetitive than wolverines but still suffer from the same bad guy over and over before you face off againist a boss. The nightcrawlers do give a decent sense of what it would be like to be superhumanly agile and be able to teleport about and are much faster in pace. The iceman levels however, are truely terrible in everyway. sliding about on his ice slide is never fun nor fast and isnt even in the movie.
The one biggest thing about the movie though is just how much liberty it takes with the licence. Wolverine is able to regenerate health over time cause he has that power, but somehow he managed to transfer it to nightcrawler and iceman too. which is dumb.
Iceman shows powers he dosent even use in the movie and fights pyro which the movies states he hasnt seen since he left at the end of xmen2.
The game has 3 difficulties and achievements are unlocked on any as you progress through the missions, and you can upgrade your charactors by finding hidden items around the levels which arent especially well hidden, so there is some replay value in doing all of the difficulties and finding all the achievements and enchancements, but why would you want to? even at thier most powerful, your charactors do not seem any stronger really.
The graphics in this game are bright and levels are laid out fine for the context of the game, but the textures are pretty bland and the destructable elements are boring - trees and the like. The camera can be a bit dodgy but general gives you decent view of the action so long as your enemies are close enough to you.
The biggest let down in the graphics are the cutscenes between missions, which are frankly, crap. the voice talent is from the movie for iceman and wolverine (though the soundalike for nightcrawler is quite good), but the scenes themseles arent anmiated at all, just stills and that is a shame because this licence deserves the extra effort.
The sound is functional but nothing stands out, with only a couple of music tracks. the attack and power sounds are underwhelming but do the job.
all in all this game is a terrible waste of a great licence and a shockingly lazy cash on movie hype. in my opinion to be avoided.