Once again, the world is in danger. Humans and mutants can't stand each other anymore, and things are going badly for Tornado, Wolverine, Cable and the others. So three of our friends decide to go on a crusade against the forces of evil. Wolverine is the central character of this X-Men 3. He has not only the most missions but also the most fun gameplay. Wolverine uses his two long Adamantium claws to slash the skin of his opponents and regain his energy. He is the brute force of the trio, the one who goes for the kill and never asks questions. Nightcrawler, also known as Diablo, is the second character of the game and the most fun to play. Not as powerful as Wolverine, he prefers to step into the shadows to spring from the darkness on his opponents in one fell swoop. His advantage against the enemy? His ability to disappear and teleport a few meters away. A delightful quality that allows you to surprise your opponent behind his back and confront us with several more or less well-designed platforming phases. Finally, there is Iceman, the ice surfer. Iceman is much faster than his comrades since he has a surfboard that allows him to fly over his enemies and send ice balls well above the clouds. Overall, the game phases where you control Iceman are very similar to Tony Hawk games or even Trickstyle. Very fun at first; the games with Iceman are also the most repetitive since it is generally enough to follow an ultra-linear path and eliminate enemies and bosses that dot the level.
Progression in X-Men 3 is done in the form of missions. The player will link the different characters: 4 missions with Wolverine, 2 missions with Diablo, 1 with Iceman, a boss with Wolverine and again. Nothing very original in all this. Z-Axis wanted to include a character evolution system to spice things up, with abilities that can increase over the missions. Thus, the player will boost the strength, speed or the special move of these three heroes to allow him to defeat his enemies more easily. A concept that would have been very effective if only it weren't so challenging to evolve! You'll have to finish each mission in each difficulty level (easy, medium and hard) to be able to face the enemies. Otherwise, you won't have enough evolutions. As a result, you have to play the same game three times, which is already very repetitive in itself. No doubt that you will want to drop the pad very often. And this is all the more true that the difficulty is rather poorly proportioned, with very short missions (2 minutes) and others too long (45 minutes). Add to that a terrible camera management with a back view that tends to look too much to the sides and lose you in the mass of enemies, and it doesn't take long to realize that X-Men 3 is a very poorly thought out game, despite all the good initial ideas.
This is all the more negative since the gameplay is not very long (barely 10 hours, knowing that you have to finish the game 3 times, that's 3h30 of gameplay). The icing on the cake is that the scenario is not even worth a look. Z-Axis was just content to intersperse the game with numerous cinematics made of collages. A genuine fault of bad taste!
On the technical level, the same observation. The soundtrack is made of direct sound effects and background music so bland that we will cut the sound.
The graphics suffer from the same defects: flat levels, non-existent atmosphere, lack of originality, rotten level design. Only the destructible sceneries and the excellent modelling of our heroes raise the level a little. The game looks pretty bad, even on the original Xbox.
Despite some excellent ideas, Z-Axis' software soon disappoints. Fun at the beginning, it also turns out to be very repetitive and therefore quickly dull. In addition to a relatively short life span, we regret the poorly balanced difficulty, the obligation to restart each mission several times to unlock enough abilities to progress in the game and the often severely placed camera. Not much good to come out of all this, except maybe the many good ideas that let us expect a fun game. Unfortunately, the result does not live up to our expectations.
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