Under The Knife: X-Men: Next Dimension (Gamecube) Review
by FBIRobby
(My Avatar is Missing)
Everyone knows that X-Men, to a degree, is cliché. However, would you expect Cyclops to say something like “Your moves are sloppy!” or Juggernaut to say “JUGGERNAUT RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUULES!” or for Storm to say “I am Storm”? These are the things these characters say in this game. Doesn’t it sound like they watched the show “Top 100 Cliché Things to Say in a Game”? Hell, they probably did. Let these quotes represent just how “good” the game is, and you’ll understand the game completely… Well, almost completely.
The Story mode was, for its time, different. Not because it was totally random and unneeded (which it is), but because there’s actually a plot to it. In October of 2002, I couldn’t recall a fighting game that actually had plots and whatnot to them. It involves a guy named Bastion trying to destroy everyone with these new robots he created called Sentinels. Eventually, both the good and bad guys realize they’re worthless without the other side, and work together to pwn this Bastard. Anyways, the story allows you to pick the character you will be with by the mission—as in, it only gives you a select number of characters to pick from at a time for a certain time period. It would have been nice to go Tekken and allow each character’s viewpoint and impact on the storyline. Oh well.
The game has a load of different modes for you to play in, although they’re all generic modes thrown together with little effort: the Story mode; the Arcade mode, where you fight random characters; VS mode; Survival mode, where you fight till you die; Practice mode; Time Attack, where you see how fast you can pummel various opponents; and Team battle, where you get several fighters and fight a friend. As you can see, none of these are really anything special, and aside from the story mode, nothing that catches your eye.
The graphics are, to say the least, weird. As graphics-whore-y this is gonna sound, this is the kind of game that needs great graphics in order to uphold a good atmosphere. This game takes the graphics all the wrong way. Some of the characters don’t even look the way they do in the comic books, which leads to people wondering if they even read the comic books before making this game. They could have used cel-shaded graphics, even, to show a comic-book-like atmosphere. That didn’t happen either. What happened was blocky graphics and bad textures. The character models look plain mediocre, with odd facial expressions. Ugh.
The music is just unmemorable, and not very good—annoying at best. A lot of the music is repeated in many stages, and they’re not very interesting pieces. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, the voices are ok. At least those are decent. Actually, wait. Forge’s voice just sounds retarded. -2 points for that.
The gameplay is very stiff. The reason for this is not just because of the controls themselves, but also because the game forces you to use the D-pad to run. If anyone can recall, the D-pad is extremely small on the GameCube controller, so how unfair is that? The game also pulls off a Tekken: it allows you to see all the moves when you pause. This is, in my opinion, one of the more retarded qualities of Tekken, as pausing to learn a move kind of kills the game. One of the things that make this game stand out is the specials bar for each character. There are four different specials, and each are consecutively stronger than the last. Each character has four of these, all unique. The problem is that you have to learn EACH of the four specials for EACH of the 24 characters. Why couldn’t they have just made the execution of the move the same and the actual moves different? Geez.
Just as a note: FLYING IS EXTREMELY CHEAP, AND ANY CHARACTERS THAT HAVE THEM INSTANTLY FAIL. I’m sorry, that was unprofessional.
The levels are actually pretty big, but they’re all connected in some way or another. You can hit a person through the front door of the mansion to go to the backyard, and the basketball court opens up to reveal the basement, which sends you into another room, so on and so forth. Not a bad thing, necessarily; it actually keeps things interesting for a while.Overall, there’s really not much worth to the game at all. Even if you were an X-Men fan, this game would disappoint. Run from this game, even if it’s in the bargain bin. There is simply nothing appealing about this game at all. I would give it a 5.7, but Forge pissed me off, so 5.5 it is.
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