July 26, 2005 - No matter how you look at it, video games, much like the big screen, were invented for superheroes. Where else are you expected to jump, shoot, punch and kick your way to victory time and time again. Even World War 2 shooters have a little superhero in them; one man against the world, saving the day with an inhuman show of courage and athletic feats. Driving games? Sure they may boast real world physics, but what they really want you to do is take a Viper and upgrade it until you’re over the 1000 horsepower mark and then take a corner at 300 mph using the hand-brake like you were Bruce Wayne in the Batmobile. Every single game out there has a little bit of super-hero in it. So why are there so few good superhero games? Are developers over thinking the obvious?

A few years ago, Neversoft/Treyarch and Activision released Spider-Man for the PS1 and proved once and for all that super-hero games didn’t have to be side-scrolling beat ‘em ups. Spider-Man, at the time, was perhaps the single greatest super-hero game ever made and it gave us great promise for things to come. In the time since, Activision has given us countless super-hero titles that while staying true to the source material expanded the gameplay concepts and abilities of the genre. The culminating point for many in this respect is Spider-Man 2 (2004) which perfectly recreated New York City and allowed us free reign to wander around fighting crime. The other game that many will also allude to is Activision’s X-Men Legends. This last title offered fans of the comics a true-to-life universe to delight in while also allowing gamers various options for upgrading and puzzle-solving. In all cases however, Activision has proven to be the publisher of choice for super-hero games and every new entry seems to be greeted with more and more anticipation as well as mounting criticism. It was inevitable then, after seeing the trailers and hearing the rumbles in comic-dom, that a Fantastic 4 game would be released to coincide with the movie. It is now a matter of public record that the movie left something to be desired, especially opening hot on the heals of the amazing Batman Begins film, but it was still fun escapism. And so, how does the polygon recreation of the fantastic foursome fare?

The video game version of F4 is a rather faithful recreation of the movie it is tied to. Yes, a few extra scenes and boss characters have been thrown in for padding, but the core story is unchanged. The game also tries to walk you through the feeling of discovery that each character experiences upon returning to earth and finding out that they’ve brought back a little “something extra”. In this respect, the initial missions/tutorials with each character are fun and brilliantly paced. Once you’ve had a chance to play with each of the four characters however, you soon yearn to be able to play with all four at once (switchable on the fly using the d-pad). And this is what is so painful about the game; you have to wait so long before being able to play as the Fantastic 4 and even then, it mostly occurs during boss battles where you aren’t left to figure out the intricacies of the team dynamics but where you have to fend for your life. Right away, this will disappoint a few.

On a brighter note, each character is well rendered (more on that later) and has all of his/her powers to play with right from the start (all of which are can be upgraded). In X-Men Legends we were given a slew of powers to play with but there was something very generic about a few of them. Many of the characters felt interchangeable and although the game was brilliant in its own right, there were perhaps too many super-heroes involved and not enough distinction between them. It perhaps didn’t help that the action was from a top-down perspective which also limited things a bit. In Fantastic 4 we are given 4 characters to explore and each one feels very different from the others. But let’s be honest, for over a quarter of a century, we’ve each had our own idea as to how each character “should” play and the good news is that for the most part, the game gets the feel for all the powers right. Mr. Fantastic is the “stretchy one” and as such feels like a wad of silly putty waiting to explode. Launching punches with him feels very satisfying and stretching out to take out a droid at 20 feet is quite enjoyable. The Invisible Woman can, you guessed it, disappear at will as well as generate shields and fire blasts of energy. While always a second-class addition to the Fantastic 4 comics, in the gaming universe Sue Storm proves to be the most fun character of the bunch to play as, and possibly the most versatile. The Human Torch is the pyromaniac of the bunch and possibly the least fun of the characters to control. While Johnny Storm may be a treat visually and graphically, his fireball attacks quickly prove useless compared to the others’ powers. Also, the Human Torch cannot fly in this version of the game, so he simply hovers and leaps into the air. While I understand the limitations imposed by the game engine, it’s still a little disappointing to be restricted in this way when all the other characters are spot on. Lastly, we have Ben Grimm as The Thing. Raw power and brute force are the key here and picking up cars or lampposts to use as baseball bats feels fun. Each character also has his/her own specialty which can be access using context sensitive hotspots. These are basically four second mini-games that generally involve button mashing. While they do serve as a small distraction for opening doors, cracking computers, etc, they don’t really add anything special to the gameplay.