X-Men Destiny Review (Xbox 360)

X-Men is probably the best IP you could ever get the rights to.

It’s a universe filled with awesome characters that can do awesome things – be it Wolverine, clawing his way through enemies; Storm manipulating the weather to blast into crowds; hell, even Mr. Goody-goody Cyclops and his powers of anal-retention and solar eyes are pretty damn dandy.

And that’s why X-Men Destiny is a pure winner for letting you play as all these chara- OH WAIT. IT DOESN’T.

Failure to launch

My issues with Destiny began before I even started the game – the game offers three difficulty levels (meaningless, but we’ll get to that) called New Mutant, X-Men and X-Streme.

Except with no context, I had no idea what these were, so I chose New Mutant thinking that’s how one started a new game.

It wasn’t until 25 minutes later, while breezing through at a pathetic rate, that I realised the error of my ways and started the game over – this time on X-Streme.

And you know what? It wasn’t all that different. I was still able to breeze my way through the levels, doing the same stuff I did before (even though I made different choices).

In fact, the only new thing I came across was the dead feeling I had inside when I realised I actually spent an extra 25 minutes playing this – when I didn’t have to.

This was just the start to the sad tale that is X-Men Destiny.

So let me get this straight…

Professor X is dead. Why is he dead? He was killed, silly.

This isn’t a movie-license, which makes the entire package that much more insulting.

The game is based on the X-Men comics, which is pretty damn awesome – except that it’s not. Any and all potential the license had, was thrown away the minute they decided to exclude from playability any of the familiar and much-loved characters in the universe.

As for plot, it’s the same old “humans vs mutants, good mutants vs bad mutants” affair we’ve seen done over and over. The game does little to provide greater context, and basically assumes you’re up to date with the comic-book universe and characters.

And if you’re not – well sucks to be you, I guess.

False promises

The game alludes to diversity; going so far as to even name the title “Destiny” and basing the entire story around choosing your allegiances and finding your own place in the X-Men universe – either with the X-Men, or the Brotherhood.

Great. Except there’s barely anything diverse about it.

Any of the 3 characters you can choose to play with – the beefy jock, the mysterious brooder and the Japanese girl with the American accent – while visually different, and exhibiting different powers, still go about things in the exact same way. Meaningless.

Every opportunity to side with either the X-Men or the Brotherhood also has no real impact whatsoever – whether you decide to cause havoc with Magneto and the crew, or help the innocents with Cyclops – you’re fighting the same enemies, in the same way, over and over.

You earn experience from beating the carbon-copy baddies – which can be used to upgrade your native powers or the X-Genes that you collect throughout the levels.

The X-Genes give you the power of the other mutants (they had to get them in somehow, I guess, seeing as you never get to play them) to fill up slots of offence (harder hits), defence (thicker skin), and utility (super speed).

But this is, again, all meaningless – because you’ll just be hitting the same buttons over and over and over again, so ignore that.

Graphically, the game also falls flat – the characters you interact with look shiny enough, but overall the entire thing looks like a re-textured title from the last generation.

In fact, they should have called this X-Men Destiny HD, because I’m pretty sure that this was a Xbox/PS2 title Silicon Knights had sitting on their back shelf somewhere, and decided to throw out for a laugh.

So that means that there isn’t even the distraction of pretty colours and flashy effects to ward you away from characters you don’t care about, in a world that you’re thrust into with vague context – to do things you’d rather not do because there are Golden Girls reruns on TV, and that’s far more entertaining.

Destiny-X-shmestiny

The thing about X-Men Destiny is that the game is purely mundane, repetitive and offers nothing to gamers except for the tedium of a few hours of button-mashing; leaving you to wonder, in the aftermath, why you actually wasted time doing it all.

The game lasts about 12 hours – and if you exclude the amount of time you’re sleeping with the controller in your hand, that can be reduced to about 4 hours.

In fact, this game is so boring that I even nodded off writing this review about it.

If you’re a fan of X-Men, or gaming, or the concept of fun at all – do yourself a favour and avoid, avoid, avoid.