Wolverine: Origins

Wolverine: Origins. Aaaaaaaaaaarrgh. For the love of god, I can’t think of any other game that’s infuriated me as much as this. At least, not one that has dangled the carrot in front of me so successfully that I’ve forgotten I’m tramping through miles and miles of shit. I’ve spent the past however long typing out paragraph after paragraph, none of which really hit what I actually feel about the damn thing. So I’m gonna try to just be as basic and simple in what I say, to try to get it out right.

It’s got the base of a good game. Combat is fun and free flowing at its best, and at least entertaining to watch at its worst, and it’s an exceptionally pretty game. Watching bits of Wolverine get shot off and then grow back is amazing, and the damage after getting hit by a rocket is nothing short of breathtaking.

However, every time that there’s an enjoyable part, there’s another part that causes me to have a minor heart attack. Taking control away from the player so that Wolverine can do something cool is retarded. I’m struggling to think of a reason for it beyond pure goddamn malevolence and general bastardry. For example, near the start of the game: Wolverine climbs a hill, kills some dudes who are standing around and hijacks a jeep, which he proceeds to slam into a giant wooden gate which was in the way. The jeep ramps into the air, and as it soars towards a nearby Big Fucking Rock, Wolverine jumps out and beats the shit out of two unlucky guards who were standing nearby. Awesome right?

Right. Badass. However, from the second you start pushing that jeep, it’s a cutscene. At no point from then until the two guards are on the ground bleeding do you have any input whatsoever. Why not let me do something cool there? Imagine being able to choose between, say, tearing off a door as you go and throwing it at one of them, or slamming the two of them together as you land, or even going down with the jeep, waiting in the flaming wreck for them to go “JESUS CHRIST” and have a look around, and then jumping out covered in flames! It’s a GAME. Let me decide how I’m going to play the damn thing!

And for gods sake, I’m WOLVERINE. Don’t make me someone who can explicitly cut through metal doors and then go “oh no a metal door, better go do some bullshit sidequest!”, because it makes precisely NO GODDAMN SENSE. Why don’t I just cut through it? That’s kind of my thing, man, I cut through metal doors with my metal friggin claws. It just feels like the level design team did the levels for another game, and then decided to just move them over to this one when the other one tanked.

The story diverges from the movie somewhat, which is, to put it bluntly, a mistake. In a movie, constant flashbacks can be a good way to enforce the importance of a past event, or to slowly reveal information in a manner which gives it context and importance. In a game, it’s a way to force you to constantly go back to the same area over and over and fucking over, fight the same enemies, and slowly get told fractured bits of questionable relevance which will be forgotten by the time you come back. I genuinely dreaded the flashback sections.

Now, for a game with a main character such as Wolverine, it makes sense for the combat to be a fairly strong focus of the game, but it’s just so frustratingly shallow. What is there is usually excellent, with giant group battles being easily the best part of the game, and just jumping across the battlefield to hit some poor bastard hiding behind a tree-stump while his mate looks on with horror is amazing. However, once you’ve had a few big fights, and you start to look for some expansion or customisation to your fighting style, there’s very little.

“Fair enough,” I thought “maybe they’re just trying to keep you in character as Wolverine? It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of upgrades to get, but maybe those unlock more moves and special attacks?”

Well, they don’t. And it is depressing when you realise this, because it feels like the best part of the game has been given the least attention. Once you realise this, things just start to cascade. The boss battles are atrocious, with them getting one type of boss enemy who you have to jump on the back of and them hit, and then making absolutely no new boss enemies until you’re about halfway through the game. All they do is throw more of them at you, or different looking ones at you. I knew I was in trouble when I was in the flashback mission fighting a native african tribal…. thing, with the exact some moves it took to bring down a genetically engineered, monstrous….. thing.

And then you get to another boss battle where you have to struggle with both ridiculous camera angles and wonky controls, and then a boss battle where you get to struggle with ridiculous camera angles and wonky controls, and then, in a fit of creativity nobody saw coming, you get to fight a big genetically engineered monstrous thing, with ridiculous camera and WONKY CONTROLS. Who designed these enemies? Who decided that one was enough, and you should fight eighty of the bastards? THEY WERE WRONG. I will admit that it’s pretty fun to fight the spandex blue ancient zippy enemies, although they were a bright light in an otherwise dismally dark game.

If it sounds like I’ve been too hard on this game, it’s because what it does well, it ignores, and what it does badly, it constantly shows you. I did enjoy parts of this game, particularly a big arena fight in a snow covered forest with some 30 enemy soldiers trying to take me down, as I bounced around like a rubber 5-year-old on methamphetamines, but it is so difficult to separate that from the bad. Despite the parts that were good, I can’t recommend it