I miss the ninja turtles

Ok I am not the biggest fan of the X-men, I don't hate them, and I understand why people like them. Cool mutant powers, fairly dark story line, and fairly likable characters. However when it comes to video games, decent x-men games are far and few in-betweens. Unfortunately if your looking for a good gameboy advance x-men adventure your going to have to wait a while longer.

I was looking for a good brawler for the GBA, and since I couldn’t rent Final Fight I decided to rent this instead.

Story.
Cyclops, Rogue, Storm, and Wolverine have found themselves in another dimension, ruled by apocalypse. In order to return home they will have to brawl there way thorough several stages, of course this won't be easy, all there x-men friends and enemies are out to kill them to.

Graphics.
Remember the x-men arcade game, this game tries to duplicate that feeling fairly well. While it doesn’t succeed it definitely does bring out the truth in the fact that the GBA is about has powerful has the SNES. The colors are bright and the sprites are fairly well detailed, however the animation is a mixed bag. While Wolverine and Rogue have a lot of animation sprites and move very smoothly, they seemed to have skiped doing Storm and Cyclops, there lack of frame is obvious, and even simple action such has walking look incredibly choppy, and Cyclops moves like such a dork it's laughable.

Gameplay.
Remember all the great Konami arcade games made back in the 90's, Ninja turtles, Simpsons, and the X-men arcade game. They all add great game play for brawlers, the enemies where big, fairly hard to beat but not impossible and the games went on at a fairly smooth pace.

Unfortunately this can't be said about reign of apocalypse. The game goes at slow pace with only 5 screens per stage, but about a million bad guys per screen. And they’re all really big. What does this mean 5 big guys each taking up about half the screen. This means it's impossible to move around without getting hit. Also there's about a million waves of the same kind of enemies over and over again, on the same screen. These guys don't get killed easily either, it takes a lot of hits to kill one simple bad guy. You'll find yourself getting board after killing your 10th behemoth bad guy on one screen, only to find yourself groaning has more bad guys decide to file there way on screen. Nintendo may have made the GBA sturdy, but it wasn’t because they where hoping people where throwing it against the wall in frustration.

The controls are not much help either. While I had no problem moving my X-man to a spot where I wanted them, I had a hard time pulling off their combos. Each X-men has there own combo's the first one is don't by taping the punch button several times. After a while they do an attack with some sort of power and knock the bad guys on their behinds. Unfortunately with the exception of Storms, I found it hard to pull off no matter how many times I pressed A, and Cyclops was darn near impossible to pull off.

They also have a projectile attack, or dash attack. While I had no problem getting the button combos right for this, and no problem when the projectiles attack of Storm, and Cyclops off, I had a problem with Rogue and Wolverines Dash punch attacks. Since the screen is so small and the bad guys so huge, I found myself often stopping in front of a bad guy, who gave my character a beating of a live time.

The next attack is a rather easy one wait until a blue mutant power bar goes to full power and then hit the L key. This sets off there ultimate mutant attack. Which most of the time misses and when your characters returns to normal the bad guys continue to knock the stuffing’s out of them.

Final recommendation
To be honest this game is probably the most frustrating brawler I have ever played, and to make matters worse it's short, you'll be able to beat it within about one day after purchase, provided you don't break your gameboy in a fit of rage. After you beat it won't be an experience that you'll probably want to repeat.