Review #569: X-men - Reign of Apocalypse

 Apocalypse's reign means bad games.

 It's September of 2001, the GBA is about to celebrate three months of existence, and then you see it, 'X-men: Reign of Apocalypse', lying there on a gamestore's shelf. And how enticing it looks! A beat'em up that appears to look great and features the X-men, the hot property of the era. But, luckily, you don't get to purchase it at the time. 17 years later, here were are...

 Told through boring text-boxes implying dialogue between Wolverine, Rogue, Storm and Cyclops, as they go through 12 stages in order to defeat Apocalypse. Along the road they'll battle X-men such as Gambit and Phoenix, or villains, like Magneto or Pyro, without proper explanations. It would've been a nice bonus to unlock these other characters, but alas, there're no unlockables here, being limited to the first four previously mentioned heroes. Each character has their own attacks, but share the same story, dialogues and endings, so there's no reason to replay the game with the rest of the characters.

 The game plays like any classic Beat'em up game: Walk to the right, until you can't walk anymore and enemies spawn, defeat every enemy and then, and only then, can you move forward. Each character has access to a simple combo by mashing the A button(Except Cyclops, who, for whatever reason, has a single, weak punch), a strong attack with B(Which is pretty much useless), a health-consuming special move by pressing A+B, R to jump, half quarter circle+A for a special move and, lastly, a super move by pressing L after you fill the blue gauge below your health, by dealing and receiving damage. It's a decent amount of moves, but the game is so boring and dull that A will be all you need. Seriously, the backgrounds are lifeless and boring to the point of being forgettable, and they are poorly implemented, in Magneto's stage there's supposed to be a cliff that ends on air... on which you can walk on.

 But that's the least of the game's problems. For instance, I had trouble getting Wolverine's combo to come out. Sometimes I had to mash A and it would come out, sometimes it seemed like it depended on Wolvie's distance to the enemy. The game is just boring, there're too many enemies that are barely aggressive and don't have particularly interesting attacks. Bosses look cooler, quite cool as a matter of fact, but they are barely any harder than normal enemy fodder. Character animations are hit or miss too, Storm looks fantastic, Wolverine and Rogue have some great animations(Look at Rogue's walk cycle or Wolvie's keyframes on his attacks!) but Cyclops looks and animates horribly.

 X-men: Reign of Apocalypse falls below the mark because it's not just as average as you can get.... it's also boring. You can make simpler beat'em ups that are more fun, for instance, take the very first Final Fight game. It's a shame too, because you can tell that some talented people worked on some of the game's sprites.
 4.0 out of 10