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it's alright

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: October 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After I saw the movie I was in a real "X-Men" mood so I went out and bought this game. When I started playing it I became very frustrated. It doesn't show you how to do any of the moves in the instruction book (not that I ever need an instruction book to learn moves). To do moves in this game it takes a lot of practice. So to find out how to do anything with a character you have to go into this boring and frustrating training mode. Once you master a character it is then easy to complete the game. But then, if you want to play another character, you have to go back into the training mode all over again. The endings in this game are very short and unsatisfying. The good thing is that after you have beaten the game with everybody you can view each ending linked up together and then it makes a lot more sense and you get more satisfaction. There's lot of things to unlock in this game but no codes. No secret characters. The worse part about this game is the gameplay. I recently went back to play this game after not playing it for about a year. I found out that I had forgotten to do all of the moves. So rather than go back into training mode I just turned it off and put it anyway. I'll probably never play it again.

Too Bad

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: August 10, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I was completely looking forward to this game coming out and went to get it as soon as it did. When I popped it into my playstation it was exciting to see the X-men in 3d. However, after a day of playing it, I was bored of it. The game's graphics were a little too boxey for my taste. The characters are not nearly as smooth as Tekken's are. Reverting back to a limit of 10 characters, it's hard to keep alot of interest in this game when most other fighting games are now into the 50's. It's very difficult to keep interest in a game with so few characters. There's nothing ground breaking or different in this game then from fighting games from 5 years ago. With games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Tekken Tag, why would you want this game. It's definitely worth a rental though. Like I said, it's cool to see the X-men in 3d. I got really into it when I started playing, but after a while you begin to realize it's nothing more then an mere "classic" fighting game. To add to all of this, many of moves are really difficult to pull off in the middle of a fight. So, in general, If you're used to games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2, you will not like this game. It's hard to adjust to so few characters. It's too bad, I'm a huge X fan and wished this could've been more then it was.

Lots of strengths, lots of weaknesses.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 27 / 30
Date: July 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is a game that invokes my most extreme love/hate impulses.

On one hand:

a) Excellent representation of the comic-book characters, both in terms of image and personality. It's a huge attraction to me because I used to read the comics, and I think fellow readers (or ex-readers) would also enjoy this aspect.

b) Lots of innovative touches, such as dressing Player 2 characters in the movie's costumes, even if they're much inferior to the comic-book costumes, and offering up great cover art for X-Men past issues during the (pretty long) loading times.

c) Including the movie trailer, even if I think the characters' image created for the X-Men movie is laughable, Cyclops, Magneto and Jean Grey being especially dorky-looking.

d) The inclusion of Phoenix/Jean Grey, one of X-Men comics' most complex characters (and my personal favourite), but rarely used in X-Men-related games.

e) Beautiful graphics overall.

f) Innovative "multiple-level" super-move system.

g) Great backgrounds.

Countering these strengths:

i) Sluggish response. It's hard to take advantage of an opponent's mistakes because of this. Also, the "hard" attacks become nearly useless because they take forever to come out.

ii) Imbalance. Mystique's gun is overwhelmingly powerful, and Beast can pull off a barrage of nearly-zero-recovery attacks with little risk to himself, but Storm and Gambit are too weak.

iii) Too little push-away for ordinary attacks. The chain-combo system leaves plenty to be desired.

iv) Some computer characters are pretty cheap -- Toad will toss you three times in a row if you don't retaliate, and that is made difficult by the slow response.

v) Terrible, terrible manual. Not only does it not give you a list of moves, but it's rift with typos and mistakes. To get *most* of the moves you have to go through the "Academy" mode, which is too slow and also doesn't teach you everything. I've already found one super move for Phoenix that isn't taught to you, and nowhere does it say how to pull off Counters, which the computer uses liberally (and fairly cheaply) against you.

vi) Too few characters. In the beginning, in fact, you can only choose from six X-Men. After beating the game four times you can select Toad, Mystique, Sabretooth and Magneto, but even that only brings the tally to 10, pretty flimsy for a modern fighting game.

vii) Bad endings. The developer should look at Tekken 3's beautiful, story-rich endings. X-Men: Mutant Academy's Arcade endings are very skimpy -- even the Academy mode's endings are better. Mystique's Arcade ending is especially bad.

Even if it's riddled with flaws, damned if I don't keep playing this game. The Capcom "Vs." titles, though pretty good, didn't offer up the more offbeat X-Men characters (Phoenix, Beast, Toad). If the mechanics of this game were better, it could really give Capcom a run for its money.

Great game but could've been better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: October 11, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Before the start of this review, I just want to say that I am a fan of the X-Men since The Dark Phoenix saga. That aside, this game has the makings of a good start in truly representing the comic book medium. In this incarnation of the comic book series, you must fight all of the heroes in order to advance to the villains and ultimately, Magneto. While the 3-D renderings look great on the characters as a whole, the implementation onto a 2-dimensional environment loses the overall effect. While that may be a minor blow, the bigger problem is that it uses basically the same game engine as Street Fighter Alpha, which is very outdated. The makers should've went all the way and created a rich 3-D environment for the characters to interact with, similar to the far superior Spider-Man (just released). If you really like the X-Men, buy this game and overlook its shortcomings. But for the casual fighter fan, wait for PS2's Tekken Tag Team.

Pretty Good

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 27, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is a respectable effort by Activision at a fun X-Men themed fighting game. The characters look great but lack some of the speed of other fighting games on the market. I was personally disappointed in the limited cast of 10 characters (Cyclops, Phoenix, Storm, Wolverine, Gambit, Beast, Toad, Mystique, Sabretooth, Magneto). Colossus? Shadowcat? Nightcrawler? Iceman? It seems like these and other characters could have been added for more variety. Also disappointing is the stages. There are only 10 and they repeat themselves. For instance, you always fight Cyclops in the Danger Room, always fight Storm in the Morlock Tunnels, etc. The fighting 'ladder' is also no fun. No matter who you play, you fight the computer in the same order, with the same backgrounds. Bor-ing! On the flip side, there are some things which keep it fun. One is the alternate costumes (including the movie versions of each character). Another is the Cerebro Mode, which unlocks various behind-the-scenes and animation sequences. I especially like the unique taunts from each character. Gambit: "Dealer wins, not yo' day!" Phoenix: "Your mind is weak." Mystique, "Lick my boots." Etc. Each of them have a few taunts and victory trash talks which keep things fresh, at least until you memorize them. This game would be more worthwhile with more variety: sequence, characters, backgrounds. However, this is a pretty good start and maybe a sequel will have more juice.

Great X-men Game...OK fighting game!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 29, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I was really excited to get this game because I love both the X-men movie and 3D fighting games. There are a lot of features and extras to unlock in the "Cerebro" mode, but for the work you have to do in order to earn some of them, it can be rather disappointing. You can unlock scans from the comic books by beating 10 rounds in survival mode using one of their costumes. But in order to unlock pictures from the movie you have to beat 20 rounds with a character in their movie costume. This gets very frustrating because 1. they give you no indication of how many rounds you have beaten until your game is done, and 2. the pictures you unlock are awkward and some are just cheesy cut-out and paste pictures, not high quality pictures you would see in a magazine review or at the x-men movie website. In fact I think the only worthwhile unlockable secret in the game is after you have beaten the arcade with all 10 characters you receive a "story style" FMV. Basically it links the FMVs you see at the end of the arcade mode together in a pretty cool way (but it doesn't actually tell a story). So basically if you are looking for a great way to play and fight as your favorite comic book heroes I recommend this game. But if you are only looking for a good fighting game to play for several hours and unlock tons of cool extras I think you should try another game. P.S.: I do recommend getting the strategy guide or downloading one of the 'net, because the manual is pretty terrible at describing your moves.

Okay for awhile the I just get sleepy

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

*Yawn* Another fighting game? Yeah... pretty much.

I'm not a big fan of fighting games but I was willing to give this aged title a shot. I was really disappointed. It gets reptitive real fast. The bonus is you get a lot of interesting moves and combos which is cool.

The problem is fighting games get so tired after awhile.

Awesome!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: July 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I went out and bought this title and I was quite surprised when I started playing it. First of all, the graphics are pretty impressive considering PlayStation being a 32 bit system. The character textures are very well done but the fighting backgrounds lack some detail. You can choose from 10 X-Men characters, 6 of them are the good guys, 4 of them are bad guys (and gals). I was a little bummed that there were only 10 playable characters but I didn't get bored using all of them. Second, the sound is excellent. The voiceovers were well done. It sounded like the voices from the X-Men animated series. The Academy option isn't that good, you just learn how to pull off different moves. The Cerebro option is cool because you can watch the movie trailer and view quite a few comic book pics and some pics from the movie. You can also unlock some character movies and some extra costumes. All in all, I think this game is worth buying and it is pretty entertaining.

Finally a Good X-men Game for the playstation

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 31, 2000
Author: Amazon User

In X-Men Mutant Academy there are so many different ways to play:Survival Mode, Arcade Mode, Academy Mode, and Two Players. There are also hundreds of FMV's and screenshots to unlock. The graphics are pretty good. The sound however is X-MenMA's weakest point. Although the music is good you can hardly hear it while your playing. The difficulty is hard, even on easy it's surprisingly challenging. If you want to unlock all the FMV's and screenshots from the comicbook and the movie it will take you a few months if not longer. If you want a challenging fighter with tons of extras check it out.

Excellent Fighting Game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 26, 2000
Author: Amazon User

X-men Mutant Academy is a pretty cool 2-D fighter with with 3-D rendered characters. It plays a little bit like the Street Fighter Series but its gameplay is excellent. Each character has their own strengths and each are pretty fun to play with. Each character has a variety of Super Moves (some of which I am still trying to figure out). The characters are Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, Gambit, Phoenix, Beast, Sabretooth, Mystique, Toad, and Magneto. Although the number of characters you can use is small, its still a very fun game to play.

The graphics are excellent. There are different scenes behind every battle such as the Danger Room, the Bayou..aka Gambit etc. Each character has very cool voice overs which are played at the end of each battle.

Bottomline, where this title is not as stong as the Tekken Series, it is still a very fun fighter for the Playstation! Its excellent graphics, sound and gameplay will have you coming back for more and more. This one is well worth a purchase!

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