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X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition

I Smell... Trouble

Wolverine's heightened senses are also included in the game in the form of the Feral Sense ability - when this power is activated, the expected route towards your next objective becomes visible and all enemies, important objects and bonus items are highlighted. Feral Sense also allows you to see otherwise cloaked enemies and makes it easier to spot any hidden bonus items.

Bonus items include a number of different Mutagens that can be activated in one of three slots for a specific bonus, generic health upgrade items that add to your health pool and dog tags found on dead soldiers. Finally, a couple of somewhat obscure locations hide small Wolverine figurines that are used to unlock alternate costumes. Those who really put some effort into crawling through every spot can also find several hidden Easter Eggs.

Wolverine also gathers up experience points along the way and gains levels, increasing his health and awarding skill points. These points can then be assigned to a number of skills from the character menu. Character menu is also used to select your active mutagens from the ones you have found so far. Experience is predictably awarded from kills, with tougher opponents giving substantially better rewards. Any dog tags you find along the way also award an experience bonus. In addition to leveling up, wolverine also accumulates points in Combat Reflexes - whenever you kill enough opponents of single type you gain a small damage bonus when fighting against that specific type.

Available mutagens to improve Wolverine's powers in several different ways.

Spending skill points to (slightly) improve Wolverine's abilities.

Unfortunately all these fancy character advancement features are mostly just for show. The pratical effect to fighting is fairly minor. Okay, adding skill points to your Claws does increase the damage, but the increase is not substantial enough that you'd really feel it. Fortunately this doesn't really harm the game - the fighting stays entertaining all the way even if Wolverine doesn't get to one-shot everything in the later levels.

Featuring Unreal Engine

Wolverine uses Unreal Engine and as seems common with many recent multiplatform titles, offers almost no graphics options. You can change the resolution and enable a "low" mode for simpler lighting and no shadows, but that's all. In other words, if your PC doesn't at least match Xbox 360 in hardware (GeForce 7800, dual core CPU), you will end up having to scale down the resolution as it's the only adjustable bit that truly matters. In practice you need a bit more than the box claims as a minimum to play without problems at a respectable resolution (1280x1024 or similar widescreen resolutions). PC version also installs PhysX libraries, but I'm pretty sure that it is used only for CPU-based physics effects - destructible objects, ragdolls and other bits like that.

Normal High Quality mode.

Low Quality mode - no shadows and simpler lighting, that's all.

Visually the PC version is mostly identical to the console counterparts. This is not a big deal - the game looks very good and the PC version is superior simply because you can run it at a higher resolution. While some textures do suffer from the usual Xbox 360 disease of wildly varying resolution and there is some high resolution texture pop-in due to the way Unreal Engine streams content from disk, the flaws are hardly noticeable during normal play. The game is designed for widescreen displays but does support 4:3 as well - some bits do end up letterboxed but most of the time the game handles different aspect ratios as it should.

Animation is just superb. Raven Software has taken every memorable Wolverine pose out of the comic books and milked it for a special attack or a cut scene bit. The in-game Wolverine moves and fights like he should and this is the critical bit that makes the game look and feel so great. Okay, so blood, gore and violence is all part of it, but none of that would matter unless it all is "sold" with proper character animation. Once you get the hang of the controls and understand the combat system, it all turns into a form of bloody ballet as Wolverine lunges from enemy to enemy, ripping them up as he goes. Even the over-the-top special moves actually fit the game.

I believe this quick kill trick is called "Epic Shotgun Fail".

Okay, so that's one way to get rid of a pesky chopper pilot.

It's Just a Flesh Wound

The big ticket visual item is the regeneration ability of Wolverine. Our hero is actually modeled in four layers with separate cloth, skin, flesh and skeleton layers are combined as the main character. Any damage taken is applied to the body in somewhat realistic fashion - bullets leave holes, blades cause large wounds and explosions can blow off big chunks of flesh - yet Wolverine keeps on going. Stay out of harms way for a bit and the regenerative mutant ability kicks in, slowly growing back any missing flesh and skin on top of the indestructible adamantium skeleton.

No worries, those wounds will heal in a minute.

Ooops, did I misplace your head?

Wolverine is actually a game where a magically regenerating health bar makes sense. Wolverine is not completely invulnerable - after taking certain amount of damage without a break he starts taking damage to internal organs and if this second health bar is depleted then Wolverine is knocked out and captured. Too long falls also give the same result - the "return to last save" screen indicates you either got caught or lost the target you were chasing at the time.

In easy and normal modes you can pretty much ignore most of the incoming damage - Wolverine is able to shrug off ridiculous amounts of punishment and it is actually quite hard to end up defeated outside of certain boss fights. The unlockable hard mode changes the equation quite a bit and offers some challenge to seasoned players. Wolverine still regenerates as usual, but every bit of damage you take actually stings quite a bit and even the standard thugs with automatic weapons become a threat, especially in large numbers. This adds a strategic element - instead of concentrating on looking cool while ripping up the opposition you have to dispatch the hostiles as quickly and efficiently as possible while minimizing the incoming pain through creative use of available attacks. If only you could play on the Hard mode without first completing the game, it would help a lot with the lack of challenge during the first time you play through the game.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, VisualsPage 4: Summary, Scores

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