What was the point? (X-Men Mutant Academy (PS))

Member Name: Cuchulain

Product:	X-Men Mutant Academy (PS)
Date:	16/02/01 (24 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hmmm. Nice artwork in the Gallery section.

Disadvantages: The few characters all fight the same.

This game is crap. Nuff said.

Well, the game isn't exactly crap, just very poor. The graphics and animations are good but that is about it. There are only a handful of characters, the moves are sometimes totally impossible to get off, and there aren't enough of them.

Look at the options - get Tekken 3 (which is a couple of years old now) or X-Men: Mutant Academy. Tekken 3 has about 25 totally different characters with totally different moves and animations for each one. XM:MA has about 10 characters and each one has about nine moves, which are the same button combinations as the next mutants nine moves. The most popular is the fireball punch thang from Street Fighter. Unless you are Storm and then your moves will be next to impossible to accomplish, involving key presses that require double-jointed thumbs and about 10 seconds of no opponent attacks to pull them off.

The 'build-up' system works quite well though with the three bars under the life bar gradually building up and allowing you to unleash a furiuos attack on an enemy once it is full. Pretty bog standard in Street Fighter stylee games now? This game uses three 'special' bars for different attacks and it is possible to move the energy stored in the weakest attack's bar into the largest one. Good for when you're getting beat (which won't happen if your playing against the computer) and you can unleash your strongest attack when all you had before was a silly 'slap-his-face' attack.

This game is far too easy as well. You can easily get all the characaters and hidden costumes in an evenings play and make a big dent in the number of special covers you collect by passing milestones in Survival mode. The gallery mode lets you look at the comic covers and lots of other artwork and Topps bubble-gum cards associated with the characters. Obviously there is the Versus option and Time Challenge, as well as practice modes where Jean-Luc, I me
an Prof X takes you through the attacks each character can use.

There are comic costumes as standard, with the Movie costumes as the two player option. But what about other costumes? What about the origianl costumes or the Weapon-X costumes. And how about some other characters? Why lock it down to the characters in the film (plus Gambit and Beast) when you could pick from the hundreds of characters Marvel has pushed through the School for Gifted Children over the years? No Rogue, Iceman, Archangel, or any of the characters from SF Vs Marvel. Shame.

I think there should be a sequel, just so they get a chance to make a proper game out of this.

But whatever you do, don't waste your money on this.

Summary: