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| Flame on! |
When you’ve got the word “fantastic” in your title you’ve got to be
good, right? Well, that’s not necessarily the case with Fantastic 4. In fact,
the comic book heroes on whom the game and the movie that spawned it are based
were comicdom’s original dysfunctional hero team. They succeeded in spite of
themselves, battling their own flaws almost as much they battled super villains.
Well Fantastic 4 the game certainly has its own set of flaws, but succeeding in
spite of them may exceed its powers.
Fantastic 4 puts you in control of the team’s four heroes and their unique
powers. Mr. Fantastic is a plastic man who can stretch and shape his body, which
allows him to reach and attack enemies at a distance. The Invisible Woman can
generate force fields and bend light around herself to make herself invisible.
The Human Torch has the power to cast fireballs and ignite enemies. Lastly there
is The Thing who is all about strength and brute force. At times you’ll be
controlling just one of the troop, but a lot of the time at least part of the
team will be working together and you’ll be able to switch between the
characters on the fly, leaving the game’s AI to control the others. If you’ve
played X-Men Legends this play mechanic will be really familiar to you.
Fantastic 4 is almost a pure brawler. You enter a room, clear out waves of
attackers, and then move on to the next room. To accomplish this each character
has a light and a heavy attack, as well as a couple of special powers known as
“cosmic powers”. The cosmic powers require energy to unleash, but energy is
plentiful as it is dropped by most defeated enemies – and there will be a lot of
defeated enemies during the course of the game. In fact, keeping your energy up
is so easy you’ll spend most of your time using cosmic attacks and foregoing the
pedestrian light and heavy ones. Wading through the scores of enemies is not too
difficult to start out with, but when you bring in the cosmic powers things
become even more unbalanced.
The one factor that serves to level the playing field a bit is one that you
really don’t want in a game – the controls aren’t very precise. There will be
frustrating moments as you find yourself attacking air or misaligned to even
keep your opponent on the screen. It seems that the developers were aware of
these issues because they’ve included a targeting system that is supposed to
allow you to lock onto and cycle through targets, but this doesn’t work very
well either. But then your competition is not that good, so random flailing will
eventually get the job done.
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