Back in the day, action beat-em-up games were a lot of fun. I’m talking games like Streets of Rage and Final Fight. These 2d scrollers provided me with endless hours of entertainment as I grew up despite the redundancy, the endless hordes of identical enemies (video games had clone technology way before it was even discovered), and oh so bad plots.

Fantastic Four (FF) unfortunately despite qualifying for a typical mindless action beat-em-up game falls more into the pit of comic-book based games like Batman Begins that just fail to innovate enough, and too boring to play. This game is simply not worth taking a look at. Here’s why:

Graphics

This is the shining point of the game, granted you have a PC that can handle all the effects and the top resolution this game can run at. The character models look awesome, and the environments can be destroyed and are fairly detailed for a 3d-scroller game. The downside? Too many identical robots that come in swarms and swarms…basically all the enemies in the game come in packs of 3-4. Add that to the environments that just look a touch too stale, and the game gets old too fast. The 3d-rendered cut scenes also are plagued with grainy pixels despite having some decent 3d models. FF does not use any movie footage either- so it leads me to believe this game is not based on the movie entirely…which leads me to my next point.

Plot? What plot?

I don’t know if this storyline relates to the movie because the movie got reviews so bad I didn’t bother go watching it in the theaters. But if the grainy FMVs and the cutscenes are supposed to mirror the movie’s plot…well I’d say then the movie has virtually no plot. The game goes into the origins of FF, which involve cosmic rays…and then has you stopping a few evil plots, like moleman. S.H.I.E.L.D. somehow decides that FF is a danger to society and puts the team in prison, but then after an agreement (which entails you breaking out of prison) decides to release you to fight cosmic ray-enhanced robots??? In some kind of portal that just seems to appear out of nowhere. In the whole process you return to the space station to pick up the shield generator so you can hopefully return Ben to normal, but Dr. Doom goes crazy and the rest is all history. Yeah…I know.

More Robot-Enemies than Clone Wars.

Back in the day I’d say it’s ok to throw tons of identical punk and leather-clad biker chicks at the hero and blame it on the 8 mb cartridges back then. Now I find it laughable that the game throws endless amounts of identical iron-clad robots at FF like none other. They appear in nearly every level to the point where despite whether you’re in a hospital or a prison you’ll be fighting droids. I guess they did this mainly to appeal to a Kids rating or something but it is just plain dull. The bosses are nothing great either…I’m not nearly as familiar with FF as I am with other comic books but it involves some green-dressed up fella that appears, a mutant plant, and some weird blob like monster that comes out of the ground. With no doubt a classic (and by classic I mean bad sci-fi flick) cast of villains, FF manages to blow quite simply at good bosses.

Gameplay / Controls

Granted FF tried to do some new things with the genre I suppose. In the tradition of the new X-Men games they tried to integrate teamwork and had the game utilize 4 different characters on screen for some missions. By executing supers with other members you can do combos. In addition there are little mini-puzzles that each team can do to solve certain situations, for example if there’s a large object in your way, you’d control thing and then hit a button really fast to throw it out of the way. Alternatively if you were blocked off by a wooden door, you could go over with the Human Torch, hold the attack button at certain times and he’d blow the door open. These minigames though don’t quite really do anything useful in terms of gameplay and the whole deal gets old really fast.

Some games play better on the PC like GTA:San Andreas, but FF is not one of them. The game still will instruct you to hit the yellow button or the green one, and this is obviously not on a keyboard, so you’ll have to take some time out to memorize what button is what color, which is a bit of a nuisance. It doesn’t ruin the game, but it does add a few more minutes of learning curve than necessary.

Finally there are some collision problems. I mentioned how Streets of Rage and Final Fight were classics…well the reason so is probably because you could hit an enemy and know you were hitting them. In FF because of the 3d nature of the game and the clusters that attack, it’s actually rather hard to hit characters because of the 3d camera. Sometimes you’ll just end up swinging at air, even though it appears like your character is hitting them, and it can cost lives and plenty of frustration trying. Even after you get more adjusted to the controls though, it still is fairly redundant. Despite each character having a reasonable collection of moves, there is no need to use most of them, I find myself using the Thing’s elbow smash most of the time over and over and if not I land his fierce punch as it’s the move effective move. The game does not make bad guys that require you to really change your fighting style so it’s a simple matter of picking the best moves and using them ad nauseum.

Extras…Big Whoop

Apparently there are some extras like comic book pages, an unlockable trailer and interviews…but it is all rather miniscule compared to the X-Men games and even though I haven’t seen them all myself I wouldn’t say the game makes you want to unlock them either. None of the extras seem really worthwhile (you can watch the trailer online after all) and the game lacks severely actual media from the movie. There is virtually no movie-footage or even stills to unlock as far as I know, making this one of the worst movie-related video games I’ve ever played.
Sounds / Music

I’ll mention sounds briefly in passing because I don’t feel they need much talk. The effects aren’t bad, at least you sound like you’re hitting the guy. The soundtrack is non-existent as far as I know, and one annoying level (the cosmic-ray powered spiderbots level) has just annoying water dropping noises in the background that utterly make no sense whatsoever in my opinion. That’s that, cheap background ambience, and so-so effects.


Final Score 3.0 / 10.0

FF is still playable, I actually spent probably a good 6-7 hours before I reached Dr. Doom and just told myself this game isn’t worth any more of my time. It’s entertaining especially for the first few hours. There are better games out there worth playing though in regards to 3d action scrollers, I would go with a platformer like Jax any day over FF. As a result I can’t really recommend this game, with barely any ties to the movie, a makeshift plot and really redundant gameplay; it’s not really worthy of money or a closer look. I’d get my comic-book videogame fix off a Spiderman or X-Men game any day and avoid this one.

Recommended: No