Fantastic 4 Review

Hot on the heels of the Fantastic 4 movie comes the Fantastic 4 videogame. In typical movie-to-game-adaptation fashion, however, it only delivers barely enough to keep fans of the property happy while offering nothing to entice other gamers to give it a try. It does a few things right such as giving you all of the characters and their powers to play with fairly quickly, but at its core Fantastic 4 is a repetitive and shallow beat-em-up that only uber geeks will appreciate.

Story

Fantastic 4 follows the plot of the movie, for the most part, but several new enemies and scenarios have been added to extend the length of the game. If you are unfamiliar with the Fantastic 4, here is a rundown. Our four heroes (as well as the villain Dr. Doom) are exposed to cosmic radiation which gives them super powers. Sue Storm becomes “The Invisible Woman” and has the power to disappear as well as create force shields to blast enemies with. Reed Richards is “Mr. Fantastic” and has the ability to stretch his body. Johnny Storm is “The Human Torch” and controls fire. Ben Grimm is “The Thing” and he has super strength and is incredibly tough. You’ll control one, two, or all four of the characters during missions as you attempt to track down the evil Dr. Doom. Since the story follows the movie it is pretty good, so no problems here. Unfortunately, the solid story and characters are the only real bright spots in the game.

Gameplay

At its core, Fantastic 4 is a beat-em-up. You also have superpowers, of course, but the meat of the game is running around and punching enemies in the face. You can also switch between the characters at will with the D-pad, but not all characters will be available in each mission. There are quite a few issues with the gameplay that really drag the whole experience down, though. First off, the cosmic powers of the characters are rather overpowered and if you know what you are doing the game is incredibly easy. For example, you can use Sue Storm’s shield to never take a hit (even from bosses) and then switch to a powerful attack character such as The Thing to take them out while they are vulnerable. Another issue is that some of the powers can only be used in certain situations and you have to play silly little minigames to use them. The whole point behind The Thing is his incredible strength but you don’t really ever get to use it to its full potential in this game. The biggest problem with the gameplay is that there just isn’t enough to do. You only have a handful of attacks and it gets very repetitive rather quickly. In short, the game isn’t all that much fun to play.

Graphics and Sound

Visually, Fantastic 4 isn’t ever going to wow you but the characters look like they should which is the most important thing. The character models look good (not exactly like the actors from the movie, but good enough) and animate fairly well, but the rest of the graphics are pretty bland. The environments are bland and repetitive and it is easy to get lost which is never a good sign.

The sound is also pretty unremarkable. One nice thing is that the actors from the movie reprise their roles in the game and they do a good job, but the rest of the audio is only average at best.

Bottom LIne

Fantastic 4 is disappointing in a number of ways so it is pretty hard to recommend. It is also a somewhat surprising failure as we have seen several comic book and movie games lately that have been quite good and the Fantastic 4 is a big enough license that I expected better from it. Fantastic 4 suffers from repetitive gameplay and also not ever really letting you use the characters to their full potential. You get to use all four quite a bit and the powers you would expect to find are included, but you are only allowed to use certain powers when the game wants you to which just isn’t very fun. I do think that if you are a hardcore Fantastic 4 fan then you will probably enjoy what this game has to offer, but everyone else can probably skip it. If you are interested, definitely rent before you decide to buy.