I remember my friends had this on their old computer in my youth. Back in those days, X-Men was just a little more important to me than breathing. The concept of this game harkens back to the classic "what the heck was Claremont thinking?" days of Fall of the Mutants. You fight dinosaurs and cavemen while you look for Freedom Force (or was it the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?). Okay, so the concept was kind of odd.
But the selection of characters was super yummy:
Kitty Pryde, Longshot, Psylocke, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Colossus, Archangel, Iceman among many others who I can't remember at this exact moment.
All my favorites, characters who I never thought would ever make it into a video game were there. Unfortunately, the game itself kind of blew.
Most of the adventure was spent wandering through a shopping mall with an overhead perspective fighting cavemen and dinosaurs. You'd split your X-Men into teams of four and search one of three locations for a member of Freedom Force. The big problem: the bad guy could be in any of these three locations and you had a very finite amount of time to find him. Also, the maps were quite myopic and hard to see and small and just frustrating.
Combat was somewhat more enjoyable. When you would encounter a caveman, or a dinosaur, on the overhead map, you would switch to a side view, Street
Fighter style. Well, okay, Street Fighter is a little generous but...anyway.
So you'd have Wolverine versus a five foot three inches tall dinosaur and he would just a punch and slash and eventually die. Did I mention that the grunt bad guys were way over powered?
If you used a flying character, they could fly around. I say a flying character because they were all pretty much the same. Archangel flew and could shoot his razor wing tip things, whereas Marvel Girl would fly and shoot big blasts of telekinetic energy. They were, for all intents and purposes, the same character. Rogue would fly, but she couldn't shoot anything, so she was guaranteed to die a quick death like all the other hand to hand combatants.
One nice feature is that, on the overhead map, some characters could use their abilities to get through the difficult map. Archangel could fly over obstacles, Nightcrawler could teleport through walls. So that's a plus.
On the whole, however, this game had a TON of potential and I think it is worth trying.
