Is it the summer of sequels at the movie theater or the video game store? So far in the past month I have reviewed Spider-Man 3, Transformers, and now Fantastic Four. I guess it would be naive to think that studios are not going to cash in on whatever merchandise they can think up and these days video games seem to top the list. Unfortunately it has become standard for games released side by side with their movie counterpart to be utterly terrible. Every now and then a shining star sneaks through the cracks but 9 times out of 10 these games are thrown together quickly and with little inspiration; made only to please the true comic book fan-boys that would buy a bag of dog poop if it had their favorite character’s face on it. Developer Visual Concepts and publisher Take-Two Interactive got the green light to port the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver movie over to every video game console ever created, there is a Sega Saturn version of this game right? Anyhow what that means for next-gen system owners is that we are bound to got a beefed up (slightly) port of the Playstation 2 version; with online play, wait there is no online play in Rise of the Silver Surfer (my bad). So far this summer Spider-Man 3: The Game was good, Transformers: The Game was decent, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer brings up the rear as being below average; some may even go as far as to say it is bad.
For the most part this game follows the plots and storyline of the movie to the tee, there are some small additions for the interactive version plus some really cool boss characters are included from the comic books. If you have not seen the movie I will not spoil anything but just say that basically there is a threat on the planet (is it Silver Surfer, maybe not) and it is up to the fantastic foursome to save earth from yet another day of destruction. Sound familiar? This is one of my biggest gripes with movie based video games; the story is only original once, the first time around it was shown in theaters. Developers need to learn to take chances, live a little and you can still make a video game based on a movie just do your own damn story. There are a couple different themes for the levels but they are basically the exact same thing over and over again with new backgrounds/enemy uniforms. This can cause Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to become very repetitive and irritating; the individual levels are more fun but the puzzles can get irritating as well. Most of the boss fights are uninspiring and involve some ridiculous puzzle solving or one particular character’s special power to be used over and over again.
I finished the single player game in under ten hours and there were few, if any parts that actually gave me trouble or caused me to kill off all four of my heroic family. All the main characters are here from the movie, each one modeled after the real life actor. Jessica Alba is just as hot in video game form as she is in real life but using her to fight bad guys just is not as fun as I imagined it would be. There are four characters to choose from: Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, The Invisible Woman, and The Human Torch. For most of the game you can instantly switch between the characters but some levels are one player only and were built around the special powers of a specific hero or heroine. The levels where you can switch between all four of the characters become way too easy because if you die with The Thing, just switch to The Human Torch, fly away and wait for The Thing to re-spawn. I cannot remember one time where I actually had all my heroes die and was forced to restart the level from the beginning. Controlling the Fantastic Four is quite easy; one button does a light attack, one does a heavy attach, and one face button jumps. Your only other options are to pull up your character’s special power menu by pulling the right trigger, then choosing which of either immediate or timed special ability you want to use.
Some examples of these powers are The Human Torch can fly or shoot flaming balls, The Invisible Woman has the ability to turn invisible, Mr. Fantastic throws nasty super-long uppercuts, and The Thing does a ground stomp thing that is wicked cool and causes massive damage. Unfortunately I found that some of the heroes are better than others and ended up using mainly The Thing for the majority of the game, which meant that my other characters were not powered up and thus unusable towards the end of the levels. The controls (special abilities) and character select reminded me a lot of a game called X-Men Legends; which took this same premise and made a much better, more original game than Rise of the Silver Surfer could ever hope to be. You will find yourself doing a lot of button mashing and using the same special ability over and over again, even if you are skilled at the game it is still a button masher. In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer you can also power up your characters causing them to dish out more damage as well as having more health under your belt.
