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-Mforma (2006) -Low-end version played on a Sanyo 8300. High-end version played on a Samsung A930.
Summary: Miniature mutants travel to Japan to march in a maze of crates and fires.
The X-Men 3 game takes place in between the second and third films. It doesn’t give anything away from The Last Stand, so don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie yet. The first version of this game I played was on a Sanyo 8300. In it, Wolverine goes back to Stryker’s lab to find any additional information about his past. His journey takes him through an isometric maze of caves filled with inexplicable switch and box puzzles. What is initially jarring about the game is that the entire level is crammed on the tiny phone screen. The screen shots here are from the high-end version. Try to imagine them even smaller and harder to see. The graphics are dull and ugly. With things being so small it was sometimes difficult to see what was what. I couldn’t understand how Mforma could design a game where you couldn’t tell what things were supposed to be, including the characters. Wolverine and his enemies are about a couple millimeters in height and are barely recognizable as people. The only way I recognized that Wolverine was in fact Wolverine, were two little slivers of white at the end of his arms. The enemies have less distinguishing attributes. I think they are just random guards that are, for no reason, guarding the underground lab of a dead man. The second run of levels have guards that shoot lasers. The third set features guys that are slightly more powerful at hitting and shooting. There are also three bosses. The first is Lady Deathstrike. Again, the only reason I know are because of the tiny claw lines on the character. The second is, uh… Magneto? The villain is colored kind reddish like Magneto, but he teleports, so maybe it’s not him. I give up; I don’t know who it is. The final boss is something big and green. I have no idea what the heck it is supposed to be. It shoots lasers from one arm and swipes at you with the other. It looks like a mass of green dog crap. There three main levels with four parts in each one, making twelve stages, which is a healthy amount for a mobile game. However, each level is incredibly easy. Each stage section merely consists of moving crates and pressing switches to progress to the next similar stage. Sure the game is playable, but why bother when you can't really tell what is going on.
In the higher end version of X-Men 3 the camera is zoomed in on the levels. There are more characters to play as, adding extra mutant powers into the isometric fray, plus the characters are bigger and things are much easier to see. You also get an actual story in this version. Instead of A few lines of text at the beginning and end like the low-end version, there are lines of dialogue between all the characters throughout the entire game. Unfortunately, the core game play of moving crates and pressing switches is the same. Let’s get to what’s important in the better version though, the extra characters. Here you get to play as a zombie-walking Nightcrawler with bamf power. Iceman is playable and can blast s path across holes and turn enemies into blocks of ice, because there just aren’t enough boxes and crates in the game. Cyclops is only briefly playable, but his optic blasts are nice. Surprisingly, Magneto is also playable, but only for one small stage. His attacks are more powerful than the X-Men and take out enemies with one hit. Oh, you play as Wolverine, too. Each X-Man gains powers if you find some skill crystals that are stored in crates. I’m sure this is exactly how all the X-Men discovered their mutant powers; they opened a crate. The environments are larger in this version since they’re not confined to the dimensions of the phone screen. The level will scroll as the X-Men meander through caves, a samurai castle, and a mansion in Tokyo. The switch puzzles are a little more complex and many of them require the use of the mutant power of the X-Man in the room. The difficulty of this version is a little higher than the low-end, but not much because it is still pretty easy. Sound is limited to title screen music and paltry beat-up sounds.
It seems as a bit of an insult to reduce the X-Men to shoving blocks and pressing large switches. Any kind of action you may be expecting from watching the movies is lost in the menial tasks you're forced to do in the game.
Low-end version: 2.5 High-end version: 5.5 -Shawn |
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X-Men 3 (Mobile
Versions)
My Thoughts:
Fortunately, I
also download the game on a Samsung A930 and was finally able to tell what
everything really was in the game.
While the
visuals are better they are still a bit on the ugly side.
Scores: