"It's an X-men movie where you press X"

This could have been a great game. All of the key elements are there: the graphics look good, the story is great, the character building system is cool. There's just one thing missing: challenge. This game requires no skill whatsoever. The only strategy you need is to try not to fall asleep as you run around and keep banging on the X button. Even if you could die, you have health and energy potions galore to keep that from happening. The combat system has no depth.

What I don't understand about these types of role-playing games, like this one and Champions of Norrath, is at the start they ask you what difficulty level you want to play at, and all that does is adjust the game based on the starting level of your character. For example, in this game the "Hard" setting is designed to be played by a level 50 character. If you try to play the hard difficulty with a new character, it's impossible because the enemies kill you in one hit. Why can't the game figure out that I'm playing with a new character or a level 50 character? Then the difficulty setting could do something else like, I don't know, make the game more challenging? Everything else they need for a good game is here, all they had to do was give the user an option to tweak how hard it is to play the game. Maybe on a harder setting the game doesn't give you as many health potions, maybe your armor goes down by 10%, maybe your damage is 10% less, anything to make it so that beating the game requires more than 3 brain cells.

It's just another crappy PS2 game designed to be played by 6 year olds who don't want a challenge. I don't get it; the video game companies could make really great games without much additional effort. Whatever money they make by having people return to the game store and buy another game they could make even more by actually selling great games that people spread the word about through word of mouth. Here we are two years since San Andreas came out, and it's still the #1 game on gamespot and gamefaqs.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/31/06