To finally round out the X-Men movie game coverage, we have this sidescroller for mobile phones.

Ah the era when a big licensed game would come to every platform under the sun… including the humble keypad-based cell phone telephone. This time, EA handled the game instead of Activision. Their mobile division (or an uncredited subcontractor) presented us with a side-view jump & fight game. Typical of the platform, the controls are simple and the sprites are fairly large. The spritework is actually pretty nice to look at, particularly when the game gets to have a background that’s not grey military base walls.

Logan can attack, his string being extended twice by picking up enough X icons in levels (and the green doodads you find go to upgrading your strength or healing rate). He can jump, roll, block, and climb, which sounds fine but being a J2ME game translating inputs to actions can be unresponsive and awkward. This is a problem in the boss fights (Blob, Sabretooth, and Deadpool) where damaging them at all requires blocking then immediately counterattacking, or  else ducking or jumping their various attacks. There’s only a few types of soldier enemies but they don’t go down easily. Between them and the laser traps I suffered many deaths, an ignoble fate for what should be a resilient badass.

There’s few frills here either in a very straight-laced adaptation of the film. You wake up at Alakli Lake, fight through a couple of short levels in the base, then bam! Blob. He sends you directly to Three Mile Island where you have three more levels plus boss fights with Creed and Wade and that’s it. The levels that aren’t just “get to the end” are either decent ideas (rescue the trapped mutants) or instantly groan-worthy (enforced stealth), but either way there’s annoyances with their implementation.

Despite cutting out large sections of the film, this is actually the only one of the many game adaptations I’ve just played that features Scott and Emma, and the mechanic in the Deadpool fight where Logan has to heat his claws on the optic blasts in order to finish him off. This is a very minor point but I’m reaching for things to appreciate here, and these little elements of faithfulness are cool when this 500 kilobyte game is the only one that included them. Apart from that it’s a bit of a dud, being too punishing for its imperfect controls. Oh well.