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Video games based on movie tie-ins are almost guaranteed to be crap. You just know that the money used to buy the licence meant that some cost cutting measures had to be taken on some other aspect in development to keep it within budget. Usually that meant graphics, sound and/or gameplay, which are kinda important. Another reservation is that this is also one of the greatest comic characters of all time and making a game which both ties-in with the movie AND keeping Wolvie fans satisfied is going to be a tough ask. It is with great relief then and a bow of gratitude to Raven Software and Activision that they have pulled off something which isn’t a stinker, on the contrary, it is a cracking effort. X-Men Origins: Wolverine has turned out to be a hairy chested, limb severing, Adamantium induced slice fest taking some of the best bits from Tomb Raider, Ninja Gaiden and God of War.

While the game is based on the same titled movie starring Huge (sic) Jackman, it expands on the film by adding some further character development and back story. Basically your commanding officer, Stryker, is asking you to do some bad things in Africa and you break away from your mutant special-ops unit and fall foul with your brother Victor (Sabretooth). For those who haven’t seen the film, let’s just say that things transpire that makes Wolvie quite angry and is hell bent on revenge. The game jumps back and forth between the present and the African episode which happened 3 years earlier. This is used to fill out the story while also providing some good variety to the chapters in the game. Not that you’d be paying much attention to the cut-scene direction or plot development because everything pales in comparison to the combat in this game. This game is a high-five in visceral limb tearing action. Your Adamantium claws don’t just register as hitboxes and the enemies flop to the ground. You literally tear flesh, rip their limbs from their body, decapitate or plunge your entire fist through their sternum and lift them up and impale them on forklift. The methods to deal death are plentiful, imaginative and primeval. This is Wolverine at his animalistic best and killing enemies has never been such a gorily satisfying experience.

The premise of the combat is deceptively simple where you have your four basic face buttons mapped to Light and Heavy Attack, Grab and Jump. Trigger buttons are assigned to Block and Rage (much like a special attack of which 4 will be become gradually available and depletes your Rage meter with each use). The Shoulder buttons are assigned to lock-on enemy and the other to Lunge. The Lunge move is probably something you can spam a little too easily on low-level enemies as you can lock onto them and perform the Lunge manoeuvre with little repercussions. However mid-level enemies and bosses will repel the Lunge if used incorrectly so you will need to find a different tactic. It’s all very intuitive and the system is organic enough to experiment with the attack and grab moves to pull off a multitude of combos and finishers without needing to memorise complicated attack strings. Your move set expands and gets upgraded as you gain experience and the game eases you in with tips on execution as you unlock new moves. You also get Skill Points which you can use to “buy” upgrades to your claws, health and rage meters or upgrade the Rage Attacks which are unlocked as you progress further in the game. Further to this, you get Mutagen slots which you can fill with Mutagen upgrades which range from dealing more damage to certain types of enemy in your Combat Skills to decreasing the time to regenerate your health. And it’s here where I must touch on the other part of what makes Wolverine an awesome killing machine - his ability to regenerate. When Wolverine gets hit with bullets, knives and explosions your flesh gets torn away in real time before revealing his Adamantium skeleton underneath. Let him rest for a while and you’ll see his body gradually heal itself. What’s interesting is that even his white singlet starts to regenerate its threads after a while. However it’s a lot slower to do so and you don’t notice it during the game so this incongruity is pulled off quite well. After all we don’t want Wolverine to be bare chested for the rest of the game after the first 2 minutes. The overall regeneration effect is great the first time you see it and you’ll probably just to let Wolvie eat an explosion to see how much damage it does to his body. However the novelty wears off after a while and his pants are never at risk so don’t expect Hugh Jackman to be trouncing around in his underwear. Take too much damage however and your heart rate picks up and you need to avoid any further hits before your body starts to rejuvenate. Overall however, Wolvie is a tough nut to kill and even on normal difficulty I barely died more than a few times if you know when to retreat from battle.

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