If you were to ask me what I wanted to see ported over prior to the announcement of X-Men Arcade for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, I would have put the game square at the top of my “do want” list of ports. Clearly, then, I was colored excited when I found out one of my loves from the once thriving arcades in my area would be headed to both platforms.
After having gotten my hands on the port, I immediately sunk in a good several hours straight, just as I used to do at the arcades. Much of the experience is close to what I remembered, but there was a bit of a problem: nostalgia had apparently clouded the memory that this is one terribly repetitive game. But you know what? It’s still pretty fun.
X-Men Arcade is, for the uninitiated, your standard beat-’em-up that allows up to six players to pick between Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Colosssus and Dazzler. You and your buds (or complete strangers) will embark on a quest to stop the nefarious Magneto from destroying the city and, apparently, the world. All of this is tied together by the most mind-numbingly incoherent story you could possibly imagine, but it’s not like you’d be playing the game for the story. At least I’d hope not, for your sake.
As far as controls go, this is about as simple as it gets. You have an attack button, a jump button and a “mutant power” button that varies between versions in how it’s used. For instance, in the US ROM you lose life when you use your mutant power. However, if you have three bars or less of life remaining and a mutant power orb (rewarded at the end of a level), you’re allowed to use it at no cost to your health. The Japanese ROM on the other hand uses your power orbs up before it starts taking your health away. In addition, the Japanese version allows for enemies to drop mutant power orbs and energy pick-ups, making it a much more forgiving experience.
As mentioned above, the gameplay is obscenely repetitive. The game’s seven stages introduce nothing more than extra annoyances from new enemy types that appear in the later levels. If not for the ability to select between the Japanese and US ROMs, you would likely be done playing it singleplayer after your first or second run-through. But if you were going about the entire thing alone, you’d be doing it wrong; this game is all about the co-op, after all.
For its time, this was actually an amazing game. Not particularly amazing in the gameplay department, but having up to six players and a ludicrous number of enemies on-screen at once was rather cutting edge at the time. Nowadays, the best way to describe the six-player co-op experience is the textbook definition of chaos. You’ll often find yourself struggling to identify just where your character is located in the sea of explosions, mini-sentinels and flying robot parts.
Even admist all of the chaos, you can’t help but have fun; it’s simple, it’s repetitive, but that’s all it really needs to be. The Xbox 360 version allows for up to four of your friends to play locally, while the PlayStation 3 version allows up to six. If you plan to stay away from the game’s online co-op, and opt to go local with six friends to get the most out of the game, I would highly recommend dropping the cash down on the PlayStation 3 version.
Speaking of the online co-op, I found latency to be a significant issue. Your connection upon joining a game will range from decent to borderline unplayable with half-second and higher input lag. When it works, however, it really works. Even playing with complete strangers, I found myself sticking with them the whole way through. It should also be noted that if you host a game yourself, the game runs just fine — for you, at least.
If things like prolonged local and online co-op play don’t appeal to you, you won’t get hardly anything out of the game. Not only is the game incredibly short (around 30 minutes), the achievements are among the easiest on both platforms to collect. In fact, it’s so short that it’s really hard to justify the $10 price tag, especially when you have one of the greatest beat-’em-ups of all time, TMNT Arcade, on XBLA for just $5.
X-Men Arcade is still rather fun despite its shallowness, but some may find the price tag hard to get by. I would recommend it for those of you that have the four to six friends willing to run through it over and over, but for those of you who don’t, I would probably give the demo a spin before you make any decisions. If the $10 price tag doesn’t phase you, by all means, have at it. At worst, you’ll have a brief spurt of fun. At best, you’ll have several hours of it.
Score: 7/10 – Good
Review based on the Xbox Live Arcade release.
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