In another lifetime in Canada a hired thug is on the job and is ambushed in a secluded alley. He awakes to find himself in a glass tube filled with some type of liquid and hooked up to numerous wires and a mask for breathing. As he looks up he burns into his memory those who stand around using him as a human guinea pig. He soon finds he can extract claws of pure adamantium and uses them to escape the fortress in which he is imprisoned. Without any memory of his past or who he is he runs aimlessly through the Canadian wilderness and, after many adventures, finds his way to the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, Westchester County, New York.
It is now today and Wolverine (a.k.a. Logan) learns from Beast (a.k.a. Henry McCoy) that the Shiva Virus has become active and he has roughly two days to find the cure, or else die. The Shiva Virus was implanted in all of Department H's specimens to retain some control over them. Wolverine now heads to Canada to find the cure and quickly meets up with an old acquaintance, Sabretooth (a.k.a. Victor Creed), who was also a specimen of Department H, and has found to be suffering from the Shiva Virus. It is ironic that the virus will kill its victims on Wolverine's birthday, maybe he should open his presents now, that is if Sabretooth does not kill him first.
As I am a fan of Wolverine, I expected a game full of challenges and action... that is exactly what I got. I found only two drawbacks overall. The first drawback was that Wolverine was not permitted to use his claws to climb walls. It would have made things so much easier to climb over it all; but then again it would kill the overall game play. The second drawback is the lack of a default camera angle. In Spider-Man you could hit down C to reset the camera angle. This is not the case in Wolverine, which made it harder many times then it had to be when you needed to act fast and look ahead.
A surprise for me is who does the voice of Wolverine. It was the same guy who does the voice of the Joker in the Warner Brothers run of cartoons with Batman, Mark Hamill. Again, as with X-Men: Next Dimension, Patrick Stewart did the voice of Professor Charles Xavier. A special hidden movie with Spider-Man is also a neat surprise, who sounds very close to Neil Patrick Harris, a.k.a. Doogie Howser M.D. There are various movies, hidden costumes and more in which you can reveal by playing the game, or cheating the good old-fashioned way, with button codes on the main menu.
Time to get technical. The graphics compare to that of Spider-Man and make X-Men: Next Dimension look like high school students programmed it. We are talking some damn good animation, but a few glitches appear when fighting the invisible mutant hunters, but that is all. The animation is smooth, but you can tell when it loops if you really look into detail. The sound is good, again comparable to Spider-Man, putting X-Men: Next Dimension to shame. There is swearing and some blood, hence the rating of Teen.
The game took me nearly a day's time to solve. There is only one level of play and that level is hard. I solved Spider-Man on the normal level as both Spider-Man and the Green Goblin at about the same time it took me to solve X2. So what does this all mean? It means the game is the hardest I have played to date on the GameCube, and I thought getting through OSCORP security with the Green Goblin in Spider-Man was a miracle.
I do not wish to spoil the game for you, so I reflect upon the comments made when it came to X-Men: Next Dimension. If you like to look at other people who wear tight, tight and revealing (Did I say tight yet?) uniforms, then this game is for you because it is tightly revealing! As with Spider-Man, this game also leads into a next game in the series. Got to love cliffhangers!
