Game Review: X-Men Mutant Academy

Game: X-Men Mutant Academy
Console: Sony Playstation
Developer: Activision
Release Date: 11th July 2000

As I've decided it's tournament fighters month here at my game review blog, here's another weird one that I picked up in my travels. A 3D fighting game on a 2D plane, featuring 10 playable characters from the X-Men franchise and released to promote the film released in 2000, initially it seems like it might be "one of those" movie tie ins which play horribly. Luckily this isn't the case, and there's some fun to be had from it. The game has 3 competitive modes, a sort of museum mode and a training mode.

Arcade Mode is your usual tournament fighter mode featuring a fight against each character, including a mirror match, with increasing difficulty. Completing a run through this mode will unlock a new character also, as 4 of them are locked at the beginning of the game. Versus Mode allows you to compete with a friend and is probably the game's strongest mode. Survival Mode sees players fighting until they're finally defeated, only getting a health refill if they manage to defeat the opponent within a time limit. Cerebro Mode is the training mode of the game with instructional training and a free mode.

Arcade Mode is interesting for a number of reasons, the first of which is just how much health the fighters have. Not counting special moves it takes a good 8-10 "strong" kicks/punches to defeat an opponent if not more. The special moves would be a good way to deplete your opponents health if they weren't so limited (there's bars for each special), and if they weren't so difficult to pull off. The game is pretty sensitive with recognising the combos and a lot of the "extreme" ones require 4 buttons to be pressed at once after a combination of directions.

The difficulty increases as you progress through Arcade Mode as you might expect, but once you get to the sixth fight (on Medium difficulty) the game seems to get a lot harder. I found it almost impossible to get past the 7th fight on this difficulty and had to change to easy to complete the game. Not only does the computer get better at fighting on Medium mode, but the characters you fight in later stages have more powerful attacks which make them hard to beat.

The final boss fight in Arcade mode is strangely easy after all you'll have been through, making for somewhat of an anticlimax. There's not really a difficulty level which feels right for Arcade Mode, the latter stages in Easy mode are probably closest to what would make for a decent average difficulty. Versus mode makes for a good experience if you have a friend of the same skill level since you can circumvent the AI issues and probably have more fun attempting to pull off the combo moves.

Survival Mode features the same gameplay as Arcade Mode with a reduced timer, and one round per character rather than a best of 3. If you're able to defeat the opponent fully within time your health bar is refilled, otherwise you carry what you have through to the next round. Play continues until your character is out of health. While this mode is fun for a while, it can get repetitive fairly quickly.

The damage system in the game is not uncommon in tournament fighting games; there's permanent damage and temporary damage which must be cemented by landing further blows on the opponent. If temporary damage is left long enough without a followup attack, it will slowly heal. The temporary damage to a player is shown in red on the health bar. There's also a block system where players have the opportunity to counter 3 of the opponent's moves (these are in yellow below the health bars).

Movewise players have a choice of 3 punches and 3 kicks for a total of 6 basic attacks, not including throwing moves. At the bottom of the screen are gauges for special and extreme attacks which are only useable once the gauge is full. These controls work pretty nicely in general although you'll mostly want to be using the strongest kicks and punches in addition to any combos you can actually pull off.

The character selection is good and although there could have been more it's important to keep in mind that this is a movie tie-in so the main characters are featured, I'd assume. The balance between character's movesets in the game isn't great, some are fairly overpowered whilst others seem to have ineffective attacks. I think that in trying to make the latter stages of arcade mode challenging, the developers made the characters from those stages a little too powerful.

Graphically I think the game may have looked stylistically better on a 16 bit console in 2D, like the avatars depicted on the character select screen. The polygonal Playstation 3D isn't bad though even if it does seem a tad unnecessary for a game on a 2D fighting plane. Soundwise the game's not particularly memorable musically or for it's voice acting, so thankfully its not noticeably bad either.

Overall this really isn't a bad concept or try at an X-Men tournament fighter, and while it does have problems with difficulty and balance, the controls are good and it did receive 2 sequels which I can only assume built upon what they already had. With a decent cast, graphics and selection of modes and things to do, this isn't one of the best fighters I've played but its nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

Rating: 70/100
Grade: C