X-Men Destiny Review
| Game Name: | X-Men Destiny |
| Platforms: | Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS |
| Publisher(s): | Activision |
| Developer(s): | Marvel Studios, Silicon Knights, Inc. |
| Genre(s): | Action-Adventure, Role-Playing, |
| Release Date: | Sept. 27, 2011 |
| ESRB Rating: | T |
In X-Men Destiny, players control the fate of one of three brand-new mutant characters forced to choose between saving humanity or ensuring its destruction. The branching storyline, penned by acclaimed Marvel writer Mike Carey, features a deep element of choice, allowing players to customize the path, powers and development of their character and to decide their role in the mutant cause alongside, or against, some of Marvel’s greatest X-Men franchise characters, such as Magneto, Cyclops, Wolverine and Gambit. In this third-person action/RPG, X-Gene enhancements deliver a deeper level of customization to players’ powers, with a chance for players to experience the abilities of their favorite X-Men mutants. Gamers will evolve their mutant skills in unique ways and engage in fast and furious combat, spectacular combo-driven attacks and rewarding finishing moves against a variety of opponents bent on defending their beliefs.
KEY FEATURES:
Control Your Mutant’s Destiny – Throughout the game, players control the destiny and evolution of one of three new mutants by making critical core power and core faction decisions, which determine who will fight alongside or against them, what enemies they will encounter and which side, X-Men or the Brotherhood of Mutants, they eventually join.
Unleash Your Mutant Power – Players choose between three all-new characters – taking control at a critical moment when they discover their mutant powers – then select one of three distinct core power sets, which provide the genetic template to build upon for their mutant powers, and, for the first time in an X-Men game, are able to combine and customize different powers for their chosen character.
Walk In Another Mutant’s Genes – X-Genes – direct implementations of other X-Men’s’ powers – deliver a deeper level of customization to players’ powers and offer a chance to experience the abilities of other X-Men mutants, such as Iceman’s freezing power or Pyro’s fire power, allowing players to evolve their mutant skills in unique ways and engage in various combat and attacks.
Your Choices Shape the Story – Players now have the power to direct the destinies of their new mutant within the game by making morally ambiguous choices that do not have a clear-cut right or wrong answer.
After you pick your character you begin the story, making your way through the game and watching the story unfold is just as reading a comic book. It is awesome that Activision teamed up just right with Marvel to get thing right. Fighting is very straight forward with attacks, special attacks and blocking or evading. The game lets you the player build up what you want your chosen character to be best at by spending XP that you earn by defeating enemies and completing missions.
Be aware that you get to choose what mission you take on puts you more with the X-Men or the Brotherhood. Don’t worry about what powers you choose to build up first because this game learned where most other games failed, it offers a new game+ so you can beat it and keep all your upgrades and start over. Most of the enemies are fairly simple to take down as well as bosses. X-Men Destiny mostly features on letting the player go through the game and actually enjoy it, the hardest difficultly is really not too hard to go through it.
There is 6 powers you get to choose from, you get to have a total of 4 per play through and you can mix and match them later on in the game to your liking. As you play you find mutant genes, suits and utilities that help give your character a boost, example is you can get the Wolverine suit which grants you healing as well as the mutant gene and the Wolverine utility helps your attacks do more damage. You can mix these up or collect all of one character to trigger an “X-Mode” that will give you a boost.
On a different note the game has cut scenes, lots and lots of cut scenes where you get to talk to the Marvel universe characters and you get to pick what to say. In your first play its interesting, but on your 2nd and 3rd it makes the game longer since you cannot skip them or speed up what the other characters are saying. It does tend to get annoying at times but it is something that is just there and isn’t too bad to deal with.
I will have to say that being a fan of Marvel and comic books that Activision is the first game I have seen to get Gambit done right, I applaud Activision for getting this done right. All the characters and story lines to them are also done beautifully. Keep in mind if you decide to play as Adrian he has his own unique story line that unfolds as the game goes on. So it is fun to go through the game with each character.
Marvel and Activision have released a great game that gives you hours of play and you can change the paths you take with each play to ensure a different type of story each time. It’s fun and a new take on a comic book based game. We do look forward to more games from Marvel and Activision.
Game 2 Gamer’s Final Score 3.5 / 5
Frustration Level 
