Wolverine (NES Review)

Wolverine
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October, 1991
Designed by Craig Houston and Kevin Edwards
Developed by Software Creations
Published by Acclaim as LJN
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Magneto, everyone.

Well, I did Deadpool so I might as well throw-in a review for Wolverine. Unlike Deadpool, this is an authentic 1991 NES game that’s authentically horrible. I literally have nothing nice to say about it. A truly pathetic effort that doesn’t feel like a Wolverine game, an X-Men game, or even a superhero game. Wolverine is an utterly generic platformer with some of the worst gameplay decisions I’ve seen. The biggest one is you don’t blink when you take damage. I mean, you change colors to gray, but there’s no invincibility afterwards. No grace period to recover at all. So, naturally your attacks are some of the most low range, low impact punches and kicks ever. I mean seriously, the kick you do after throwing a couple punches looks like someone gingerly kicking a tire to see if it’s flat or not. You have to get right on top of enemies to brawl, and as you do, your life slowly trickles away. But, that’s fine because Wolverine heals from injuries. Except, they left that part out. You need to pick up.. I swear to God I’m not making this up.. burgers or soft drinks to heal you. This NES game has more menu items from McDonald’s than the NES McDonald’s games.

I just pinched myself to make sure I hadn’t died and gone to gaming hell. Then I remembered that you pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming and not to make sure you’ve passed on to the afterlife, so gaming hell is still in play. Especially since I intend to review more classic console X-Men games.

For a moment, I’ll ignore the absurdly tiny graphics, laughable enemy design, and ridiculous damage system. The one thing that you absolutely NEED in a Wolverine game is for the violence to be intense and impactful. Whatever is the polar opposite of intense and impact is how the combat feels here. It’s no impact, so naturally, you want to at least use your claws. That way, you can imagine that you’re slicing baddies so cleanly that it doesn’t even make them flinch. You activate the claws with SELECT for double the damage and.. they drain your health. Of course they do. They don’t even really add all that much range either, and even if you swing and miss, you still take damage. It’s a quarter-of-a-tick of a life bar for every use of the claws, in a game where you absolutely do not blink or knock-back or anything from damage. Any contact on anything lethal and your health begins to quickly drain. Since there’s no grace period, you never know how much damage something causes, or really how much you’re taking in general. You have to constantly glance down at the health bar.

Remember the dam stage in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Specifically the underwater section, complete with tight squeezes and stuff that damages you? This is like that, with even tighter squeezes. Only, remember, you don’t blink or knock-back this time, AND the swimming controls are so much worse than TMNT. This is one of the worst games on the NES.

This is a Wolverine game that doesn’t feel even a teeny tiny bit like Wolverine. It honestly feels like it’s outright antagonistic towards the character. There’s no way the creators of this could have been fans of the source material, because there’s nothing about controlling the Wolverine sprite that a fan would need to feel immersed, as if you really were Wolverine. That’s the whole point in doing a game based on a character, right? With this steamer, I suspect this wasn’t even meant to be Wolverine and they just took Generic Action Game Template 71189-C and added claws to it. There’s also this absurd “berzerker” meter you get for killing bad guys that gives you invincibility when it fills up. Oh, and the invincibility killed me more times than anything else in the game. Yep. You see, you can’t run and attack. This is important to note, because when you begin to BERZERK, you automatically do strikes almost continuously, making it very hard to move forward and especially build up your jumps. So, when I went to do a long jump over a pit, I didn’t get the lift I wanted because the hero was automatically swinging at NOTHING! Literally shadow boxing! What an epically stupid idea!

That’s how I died here. I think. There’s no way I shorted a jump THAT badly.

Wolverine has incredibly unimaginative level design, uninspired enemy attack patterns, and only two bosses in the entire experience that you fight back to back. The boss fights suck too. I lost a life fighting Magneto because I wasn’t sure how to hit him. I tried to kill these boulders this device was shooting at me and eventually died. I came back to life in the boss arena (the one positive thing I can say is respawn points were fine), and then the rematch ended in under 10 seconds when I stabbed the little laser barrier blocking me from Magneto, then punched him a few times until he ran away. Wow. Then the final battle with Sabretooth played out the same way. I lost a life, then I realized HE gets to be invincible. It turns out, you win by punching him off a cliff. Since it’s easy to catch him in a punching pattern, I won about fifteen seconds later, and I’ve never been happier to be done with a game.

See the purple platform I circled? For utterly no reason, it’s lethal to the touch. I guess it’s acid? Except, you don’t submerge in it. Okay, so stay away from purple platforms? Well, there’s OTHER purple platforms on the stage that act as treadmills, and you can touch those just fine. It’s a f*cking purple platform. What the everloving hell? Once more with feelings, team?

What an unlikable, lazy effort. Lots and lots and lots of last-pixel jumps. Lots and lots and lots of instakill elements like fire or spikes. Oh, and you drown in water too, but at one point in the swimming stage, you get a “device” that changes that. You’re told it. You don’t see it. It’s like the developers realized the rest of the stage had too much water and not enough places to come up for air, but instead of changing the whole layout, they just added a door in an arbitrary location where you get the “device” from Jubilee. It’s like players have to apply their own quality of life patch in real time. I don’t know what else to say about Wolverine. I made two full runs in under ninety minutes, with the second run taking probably a little under half an hour because I just ignored as many bad guys as I could and even accepted damage if I knew I was near the finish line for a stage. Wolverine does literally nothing right and isn’t even charming in failure. Fix any one problem and this would still be in the conversation for the worst NES platform game I’ve reviewed so far. Fix all the gameplay problems and it’d still be a NO! because the combat would be boring and the level design just very bland. Unlike Wolverine, there’s no healing this one. It’s just a bad game.
Verdict: NO!