I bought this game (used, thankfully) based on several of the glowing reviews it received. Mainly this one over at 1up.com that said "I like the PSP version of XML2 better than the PS2 version" and "the inventive final boss battle...is one of my favorites". Mr. Stewart gave it 4.5 out of 5. My only question: what the hell game did I get then?

Where to begin... [loading]... I was very excited... [loading]... to get this game (it took me quite a while, actually, to find it)... [loading]... but once I had, I threw myself into the game with Wolverine, ... [loading]... Magneto, Juggernaut, and ... [loading]... Nightcrawler. Guess what the first thing I noticed... [loading]... was?

Did anyone at Activision even *try* to play this silly thing? My aching ass... the only game for the PSP I know of that loads longer and more often was Tiger Woods 2005. I have a 20-25 minute ride on the bus to and from work. There were at least two occasions that I blindly ignored returning to base for supplies I desperately needed because I knew it would involve 2-4 minutes of load time. Not that much, you say, but that's roughly 16% of my bus time sucked up by loading. And don't even get me started on how the game acts when it's first coming back on after being paused and turned off...

But when the game finally did load, it had it's shiny parts. There were lots of things to destroy and Wolverine was pretty bad-ass. A semi-destructible environment that dramatically fell apart with the fight that was going on around you. Some not-so-cheesy voice acting. A+ for getting Patrick Stewart as the voice of Xavier (although I think he's done this for other games before). And there were some creative sections where some thought was involved and the necessity to switch out team members to accomplish goals.

But this accounted for about 15% of the game. Most of the time, you felt like you were simply being fed lambs to the slaughter. I lost my entire team only twice. Once when I accidentally jumped three of them into an abyss and the other when I first met Lady Deathstrike for the first time. Other than that, the game was never really challenging. You simply slagged your way through to the next extraction point or objective. This process got progressively worse as the story unfold too... less storyline to tease you with, more clay jars and boxes to break. There were notable exceptions to this: The battle with Holocaust and the Tower of Apocalypse in New York. Both were very fun to play through. Whoever made those sections of the game should have been assigned clean-up duty on the rest of the game.

More good things... um. Kinda fun playing with XMen superpowers, but they really didn't ever become a necessity. I found myself playing Wolverine as the lead almost exclusively because he simply handled the hack-n-slash of the game most effectively. Add a brute (Juggernaut, Colossus, etc) and someone who could fly and your team was pretty much unbeatable and it could manage any "challenges" that required a special power.

You also collected comic art and playable comic missions (little side-missions that follow a comic book storyline). They were usually very short and never difficult, but there were a nice touch.

More bad things... oh boy. What was up with the tech bits/money? I never bought anything from Forge other than health and energy. I finished the game with over 850,000 tech bits. Yes, I could have bought armor and shit, but seriously, with that God Awful inventory system, I pretty much sold everything I found. (After about two hours of game play, I would force myself to spend an entire bus trip clearing out inventory and organizing.) Items weren't clearly marked as being useful to any team member and the personal inventory menu showed not only what was unequipped, but what was equipped on every mutant you had available to you. I accidentally sold equipped stuff so many times, I lost count.

As for the final boss battle? After playing this game for as long as I did and realizing most of the way that it was a complete dud, I kept thinking "the reviewer said the final boss battle was awesome... it has to salvage this game!!" Again, I ask if I got a different final boss than the reviewer. I found the idea they presented interesting, but it wasn't even remotely challenging.

All in all, the game probably wasn't a waste of money... at least I'm using my PSP to play a game. But it was definitely a waste of potential. Why the hell didn't they have situations where you needed specific mutants to combine powers? And why was it so easy? I know, play on the hard level, but still...

Worthless load times, ridiculously bad inventory, mediocre use of mutant powers... I've not much else to say except I doubt I'll be picking up XML3 when it comes out.

(Note: this review does not pertain to any online functionality)

Written: 04.04.2006