This game had so many cool ideas going for it. First off: how distinct each of the four playable X-Men were. Cyclops' optic blasts are indispensable for taking out tough enemies from safe vantage points. Nightcrawler is not only the most maneuverable (thanks to his teleportation and his acrobatic dive-kick) but also can abuse his teleportation frames for temporary invincibility. Gambit has good melee range but suffers from tall people problems (he can't duck under projectiles). Wolverine gradually recovers health on his own, but also loses health if he tries to use his claws when his mutant power bar is empty.
The stages are also very different from each other, invoking subtly different genres (the Savage Land has strong platforming elements while the Shi'ar stage is more of a straight brawler). My pick of the bunch is the Excalibur Lighthouse, which almost feels like a survival horror game - there's a generally creepy atmosphere, and aside from three bosses, you spend most of the level exploring the lighthouse and evading ghostly enemies you can't damage.
Where it loses points is how unforgiving it is, both in individual segments as well as in its general format. A lot of the elements of the game necessitate trial and error, such as the many blind jumps in the platforming segments, and the bosses which have both a small hitbox as well as a very small time window in which you can hit them. One particularly dick move is the regular enemies in the final level who have a projectile that can kill you in one hit unless you know the very counterintuitive way to survive. Now I can deal with hard games, but the game punishes failure very severely. You don't actually have lives; the four X-Men are your lives. So once a character dies, that's it for them (they are thankfully revived for the final level though) - you get kicked back to the character select to pick another member, and have to start the stage over. This, combined with the sometimes obtuse boss solutions, makes the game needlessly frustrating. I saved state before fighting Apocalypse, and fought him for about 20 times before consulting a guide for the strategy (that I don't think I would have gotten on my own, even after another 20 attempts), and I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had to play through the entire level every time I died (and started from the beginning of the game every four times).
I should mention that you can actually switch to another playable character in the middle of a stage, which gives you a bit of a lifeline in case you're about to die (each X-Man has their own lifebar). But, I assume in a bid to preserve it's pretty insane difficulty, there's a limit to how many times you can switch each stage. Given how different each character's abilities are, and that much of the game is deliberate and methodical as opposed to balls-to-the-wall hectic, I wish they didn't have that limit. This would have added a slight 'puzzle' slant to the game where you could switch to the character whose abilities best matched up with the challenge you were facing. That, plus the implementation of some sort of password or lives system, could have turned this game into a classic.
The stages are also very different from each other, invoking subtly different genres (the Savage Land has strong platforming elements while the Shi'ar stage is more of a straight brawler). My pick of the bunch is the Excalibur Lighthouse, which almost feels like a survival horror game - there's a generally creepy atmosphere, and aside from three bosses, you spend most of the level exploring the lighthouse and evading ghostly enemies you can't damage.
Where it loses points is how unforgiving it is, both in individual segments as well as in its general format. A lot of the elements of the game necessitate trial and error, such as the many blind jumps in the platforming segments, and the bosses which have both a small hitbox as well as a very small time window in which you can hit them. One particularly dick move is the regular enemies in the final level who have a projectile that can kill you in one hit unless you know the very counterintuitive way to survive. Now I can deal with hard games, but the game punishes failure very severely. You don't actually have lives; the four X-Men are your lives. So once a character dies, that's it for them (they are thankfully revived for the final level though) - you get kicked back to the character select to pick another member, and have to start the stage over. This, combined with the sometimes obtuse boss solutions, makes the game needlessly frustrating. I saved state before fighting Apocalypse, and fought him for about 20 times before consulting a guide for the strategy (that I don't think I would have gotten on my own, even after another 20 attempts), and I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had to play through the entire level every time I died (and started from the beginning of the game every four times).
I should mention that you can actually switch to another playable character in the middle of a stage, which gives you a bit of a lifeline in case you're about to die (each X-Man has their own lifebar). But, I assume in a bid to preserve it's pretty insane difficulty, there's a limit to how many times you can switch each stage. Given how different each character's abilities are, and that much of the game is deliberate and methodical as opposed to balls-to-the-wall hectic, I wish they didn't have that limit. This would have added a slight 'puzzle' slant to the game where you could switch to the character whose abilities best matched up with the challenge you were facing. That, plus the implementation of some sort of password or lives system, could have turned this game into a classic.