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Far better than the movie, and easily the goriest Wolverine title to date.

It's pretty rare that you get a movie tie-in game that's actually better than the film, but that's definitely the case here with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I saw the film at a midnight showing the week before, and let me tell you, it's pretty much as bad as you've heard. However, while the game does still make use of a lot of the weak plot points from the film (Adamantium bullets and plot holes galore), it more than makes up with it by doing a great job of taking bits and pieces from other action oriented titles and plopping Wolverine down in a hyper realistic/violent world that's actually pretty new ground for the feral mutant compared to other videogame titles he's been used in.

Raven, the developers behind this title, deserve a pat on the back for taking what could have been an easy movie cash in for most developers, and actually using the property to create a pretty fantastic game, albeit with a few flaws. The easiest thing to compare it to would be God of War, and while Wolverine lacks the long range style that Kratos' Athena Blades deliver, Raven has given the title character a pretty large moveset and combo system that more than makes up for it.

Like I mentioned earlier, it does feel like the gameplay has a lot of bits taken from other action franchises, most notably God of War, but at least it's a solid homage to the series if nothing else. Wolverine uses his claws in a variety of ways to hack and slash against the hordes of enemy soldiers, tribal mutants, robots, and others, with some pretty graphic displays of violence that literally coat Wolverine in blood and gore, along with the surrounding area. Wolverine himself shows a considerable amount of battle damage as he takes in hits, and you'll see his skin peel away to reveal his adamantium skeleton and guts within, only to see it slowly regenerate as time goes by, along with your health bar. There are a number of combo's you can unlock as you progress, and Wolverine uses a leveling system to unlock special moves and additional attacks, with every enemy kill granting you a bit of experience towards your next level. There's even a long-range lunge attack that's used not only to quickly pounce from enemy to enemy, but also to allow you to get across longer jumps and other sections of a stage that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Enemy AI isn't particularly bright, but it usually doesn't need to be. You'll often just get swarmed and surrounded by enemies, which is where the challenge comes from, but on the normal difficulty setting the game isn't much of challenge outside of the bigger boss fights. One of my bigger complaints actually stems from these fights too, because a couple of the bosses get recycled a little too often, and the fights themselves are both easy and really repetitive, requiring you to simply hop on the back of the boss and hack away after dodging their attacks, and you need to repeat this move about four times or so to finish the fight. There are other, unique boss fights that are quite a bit more fun, so it's not all a wash.

The soundtrack isn't particularly memorable, with more of that big, epic score type music that you kind of get accustomed to in blockbuster games nowadays, but without any one particular theme that really stuck with me. The voice acting is pretty solid though, even if it's noticeable that most of the voices are not covered by the actors that portrayed these guys in film, but still there's no one performance here that I'd actually call weak.

As far as replay value goes, there's a couple difficulties to try out, and a few neat costume unlockables, but outside of that, I can't see much of a reason to play through the game a second time unless you want to max out all your stats and abilities. The game doesn't offer up anything exciting post game, so once you finish it, that's pretty much it. I'd say it's a perfect rental, considering the run time of about 6-8 hours, and definitely worth picking up once a price drop kicks in. Of course, if you're a big action fan, than I say it'd be worth the money to pick up currently, but keep in mind that you might not go back to it for a while after you finish it. For everyone else though, give it a rental first to see what you think, but I suspect that a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised with this one.