The Uncanny X-Men

The Good
The game allows you and a friend to take control of classic X-men characters in a fast paced, epic battle against the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

The Bad
The game's graphics are bad, with an awkward overhead perspective and barely recognizable comic book characters. The music and other sound effects are uninspired trash. Hit detection is a mess with level objectives that are not only boring but also unnecessarily frustrating.

The Bottom Line
The Uncanny X-men offers Marvel Comics fans the short end of the stick. Making a great game based on super heroes is incredibly easy to do, but the folks at LJN managed to bungle it.

The Good
Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants are planning something, well, er, um, evil. This looks like a job for the Uncanny X-men

The X-men are one of the most popular comic book series around, and with good reason. People of different generations, cultures, backgrounds and beliefs have enjoyed reading about the many X-cellent and X-citing adventures of Marvel Comics's mutants.

In addition to the comic's superior artwork, original characters and action-packed adventures, the X-men storyline frequently taps into feelings of alienation as well as being a not-to-subtle metaphor for the evils of racism, bigotry and intolerance.

LJN's Uncanny X-men allows up to two players (simultaneously) to take control of several familiar X-men team members; Cyclops, Colossus, Iceman, Nightcrawler, Storm and Wolverine.

The designers of this game did actually make some effort to give each mutant their own personality.

For example, Colossus starts out with the most hit points, but cannot jump and tends to move a bit slower then the other characters. Storm has a powerful projectile weapon, but starts out with fewer hit points.

Three of the playable X-men characters – Cyclops, Storm and Iceman – have unlimited use of a projective weapon, which is a nice feature and is respectful of the original source material.

The other three playable X-men (Colossus, Nightcrawler and Wolverine) can punch and kick their way through the massive onslaught of robots, monsters and end-of-stage bosses.

Storm is one of my favorite X-men characters and it is nice that some of the X-men characters have unlimited use of their main powers. I have always thought it was a bit silly how video game adaptions of comic book characters artificially limited superheroes powers.

In addition to these standard attacks, some of the X-men have a special mutant ability, which will help them advance in certain stages. Nightcrawler can walk through most solid objects, Storm can conjure up the wind to fly and Iceman create his own highways made out of ice.

LJN's Uncanny X-men features six action-packed stages. Five stages take place in urban locations, while the final stage takes place on Magento's infamous secret base; Asteroid M.

Success in each of the game's fast paced stages requires you to fight your way through an endless army of minor minions, while also locating the evil mutant boss who is hiding out somewhere in the stage.

You cannot simply move from left to right in a stage and expect to find the boss. A bit of an adventure game element is added to the game because you have to map out the levels and even locate some keys.

The bosses in the game are taken from the X-men comic book series. In addition to Magneto (as the final boss) be prepared to battle Boomberang, Sabretooth, Juggernaut and the White Queen.

Even when you locate and defeat the boss, the danger is not over yet. Before you can complete a stage you must (after defeating the boss) quickly return to the beginning of the stage before a bomb detonates.

The Uncanny X-men is certainly a challenging came to defeat. Luckily killing the robots, bubbles and other minor minions that attack you, often causes certain useful icons to appear.

These icons can restore your hit points, make you temporarily invincible, give you keys to access locations or (oddly enough) magnet icons that temporarily freeze your character

The Bad
The Uncanny X-men is a fast-paced action/adventure game suffering from mediocre graphics.

Even taking into account the hardware limitations of the Nintendo home console system, the famous superheroes and villains are, barely, recognizable.

Visually, the six sages in the game are not remotely impressive and look less like something from the pages of Marvel Comics, and more like the rejected ideas from the Zaxxon computer game.

Nothing about the music or sound effects are memorable in a positive way.

Again, I realize that the 8-bit Nintendo home console system had some clear hardware limitations, but the games made for the NES were capable of much better graphics, music and sound effects.

The game's odd overhead perspective makes some of the X-men's mutant abilities look silly, ad just does not really fit for the type of game that X-men needed to be.

The game play is sluggish with poor hit detection, and surprisingly very little about this game attempts to pulls you into the X-men universe.

Aside from some decent head shots of the playable X-men characters (with a brief biography of each character), the game makes no effort to tell a story, and if you were not a fan of the comic books, you might not even recognize the featured super villains.

The Bottom Line
The Uncanny X-men is a fast-paced video game suffering from mediocre graphics, poor hit detection, an almost non-existent storyline and some silly looking super powers.

It is not impossible or even that difficult to produce a fun X-men video game and comic book fans looking for some "old school" gaming have better alternatives available.

Sega produced two fun, action-packed X-men video games for the Genesis/Mega Drive, and Konami produced a classic X-men coin-op arcade game.