X-Men: The Official Game manages to put together a decent presentation, though nothing about the game really stands out, especially on the 360. Essentially, this is just a cleaner, higher-resolution version of the other versions of the game. Levels are pretty detailed and have some destructible elements to them, though there isn’t that much in the way of variety. You’ve seen one hall, you’ve seen them all.

Activision was able to nab both the voice talent and likeness of Hugh Jackman, Alan Cumming, Shawn Ashmore and Patrick Stewart. So, in addition to looking like their big screen counterparts, the characters all sound like them too. Overall, all four do a decent job, though the rest of the sound-alike cast is a bit disappointing.

X-Men: The Official Game takes place between X-Men 2 and 3 and focuses on three characters: Wolverine, Iceman and Nightcrawler. Other characters, like Colossus and Storm, show up to lend a hand, but they are limited to supporting roles. Each section of the game is split up into levels built around each character’s special abilities. Wolverine’s levels are brawlers while Nightcrawler’s are built around using his teleportation ability and Iceman ice sleds his way around in a railed shooter. Not surprisingly, a majority of your time is spent playing as Wolverine. Unfortunately, his levels are the blandest and most repetitive of the three, leading to monotonous gameplay.

Like the movie, the game’s story presents several interesting plot points that never go anywhere and seem cobbled together. It starts out strong, with the crew returning to Alkali Lake in order to recapture the parts of Cerebro. From there, it tumbles into the activation of the Master Mold, the A.I. that creates and controls all of the Sentinels. From here, the story completely breaks off into its own little plot lines that have nothing to do with anything, only to awkwardly stumble into the plot for the last few levels – but not before it takes another odd turn where two characters need to fight their inner-demons. Even the inclusion of the game’s characters feel a bit too arbitrary, especially Nightcrawler whose only real purpose for being in the game is to explain why he isn’t in the third movie.

Every level of the game has its own difficulty setting, so it is impossible to reach a point where you simply can’t proceed any further. While it is possible to quickly run through the game on the easiest setting, there are rewards for trying the more difficult levels. Sticking to the easy setting will only earn you one or two power upgrades while tackling the game on the more challenging settings earns even more upgrades. So, even if you do find that you can’t get past a certain area (more than likely, these will be Iceman levels), you can always go back to other areas, earn an upgrade or two and come back for another shot.

The only difference between difficulty levels is the number of enemies you’ll face. Enemy A.I. isn’t the brightest and relies mostly on numbers. All three mutants have a healing ability, so if you do find that you are in danger of dying, you can always stand back in a corner and heal. Sometimes enemies will take the moment to strike, but most times they are courteous and stand back while you heal up.

Both Wolverine and Nightcrawler’s levels revolve mostly around simple brawling. While Nightcrawler’s levels include some platforming areas, for the most part you’re confined to small areas and beating up the same generic soldiers. Though other games have managed to succeed using this formula, X-Men’s combat is devoid of variety. There are no combos, leading you to just mashing the hell out of buttons and hoping to land a few hits.

X-Men is not the most glitch-free of experiences either. One of the more noticeable ones is that you can usually back characters into an open door and cause them to disappear (or at least get caught up in the room – which is actually helpful when you’re facing large numbers of enemies). I also ran into a glitch where Wolverine would suddenly begin radiating multicolored geometry that would eventually cover the entire screen. This glitch usually led to the game locking up.

X-Men: The Official Game makes a good rental if you’re dying to play an X-Men game and haven’t played either of the two Legends games. And even then, you’ll probably want to toss it out after an hour or two.