We go hands on with the X-Men Orgins: Wolverine and do some and hack and slash.
X-Men Orgins takes the player back to the back story of Wolverine. The demo that we played begins with a cutscene showing Wolverine and his team mates travelling in an undisclosed location .
Things are going fine until a missile hits the helicopter and it crashes down to an unknown place. Thereafter Wolverine flies off from the helicopter and than the player takes control of the character. While you are in the sky you will only be navigating left and right, trying to save wolverine from the missiles, after a few moments you will land on the ground in a spectucular fashion. Wolverine lands with his claws spread right on an enemy solider tearing him apart.
The demo that we played had only two basic type of enemies. One with the long sickles and one with machine guns. Wolverine has two basic attacks, one a quick attack and other a brutal manouver. The quick attacks are pretty cool and can tear any enemy pretty quick. The other one takes a bit of time before one can hit the enemy, but one shot is brutal enough to get the better of your foes. The enemy AI was a bit down since i did not had any problems defeatiing some of the enemies. The demo had one boss battle , a short fight with “Machette Asssain”. The special ability of the boss was that its attacks were quite similar as compared to the basic enemies, but instead of normal sickle, he had fire bolt. I did not find the boss too engaging, and after a few minutes and slashes Wolverine had the better of him. There were a few scripted events in the demo like Wolvering jumping to an helicopter , slashing through the window, taking hold of the driver and slithering him through the helicopter blades. The secene was brutal indicating the game is bloody and hardcore.
Talking about Wolverine, hes shown to be a very tough guy. Solideres will fire bullets and slash him with sickels , but thats not enough to stop him. The game has an built meter which indicates at how much Wolverine can take those injuries , the injuries are shown in real time where the body of Wolverine starts tearing off. After killing all the enemies, there after the body of regenerates again to its normal form. This is a pretty cool addtion and shows just how much badass is Wolverine. Now that takes us to few new features in the demo. The game has a levelling system in which you will gain extra health and your health meter will increase. Also Wolverine has path finder called as “Neural Finder” which will help Wolverine to find the right path, just as those found in Dead Space and Prince of Persia. Plus there are other new offerings like Skill sets, Mutagens which use to equip special powers found in the game. Than there is the basic move set found in most action games. Also it will be tough to miss out one element of Gameplay : the jump power. When activated with the Wolverines just flies off towards the enemies slashes him, i can just say one thing, Wolverine has top of the world moves and it feels very satisfying. That being said the graphics and the environments are a bit of let down. The textures are pretty bland and character models and animations aren’t top notch. I know this is a demo and when we get this game, hopefully the visuals will be up to the mark.
Overall, X-Men Origins feels like a true hack n slash game. All the basic elements like scripted events and other features that an action should game must have are present in the game. Watch out for the full review soon.
First Impressions : 7/10