The first X-Men game to hit the DS, X-Men: The Official Game is a fairly ambitious game. Using the DS’s touch screen aspects in an innovative way, the game does things a little differently than most games on Nintendo’s handheld. Unfortunately, the overall experience feels pretty bland, with repetitive and simplistic action. While X-Men: The Official Game does try to be creative and make good use of the DS’s more unique elements, it’s ultimately a dull experience.

X-Men: The Official Game takes place between the events that occurred in the second X-Men film and the upcoming third film. You’ll play as three X-Men (Wolverine, Iceman, and Nightcrawler) as well as their sworn enemy (Magneto) as the stage is set for the next movie. You’ll fight against various enemies from the comics and the films, utilizing your characters’ abilities to defeat your opponents.

Each of the characters has their own strengths and weaknesses, so you’ll have to exercise a fair amount of strategy as you play the game. Wolverine will be the basic workhorse, utilizing powerful attacks, although having an unfortunately short range and an inability to take on airborne foes. Iceman will specialize in shooting ice attacks from far away, but not quite packing the same wallop as Wolverine. Some enemies will also have special shields that are immune to Iceman’s attacks. Nightcrawler can “bamf," basically allowing you to briefly stop time to get the drop on your opponents. Magneto is kind of a beast of his own, capable of chucking objects from the environment at enemies. You can switch out your players on the fly by hitting the shoulder button, something that you’ll have to do frequently in order to defeat your foes.

X-Men: The Official Game’s use of the DS’s control scheme is a bit of a double-edged sword. While it may be an original approach to an action-fighting game, it isn’t implemented very practically. While using either the D-Pad or the face buttons (if you’re right or left-handed, respectively) you pretty much have to tap the stylus on an enemy until it kills them. If you tap the screen correctly, you’ll be able to perform combos, but other than that, you won’t have to do much with the touch pad to play.

Graphically, the game leaves much to be desired. It uses 3D sprites superimposed upon static 2D backgrounds. While the backgrounds are very well detailed, the 3D characters look too small and blurry, and the overall look feels very unpolished.

The sound fares better than the graphics with a very nice soundtrack, offering up a crisp, orchestral score that sounds quite impressive on the DS given the space constraints. Unfortunately, due to that, the game doesn’t feature any voice acting and the sound effects are pretty sparse.

X-Men: The Official Game is an original concept that seems good on paper, but the execution could’ve been handled much better. As it stands, the game is an interesting experiment, but a pretty dull game.

Gameplay: 6.0
The game makes interesting use of the stylus and touch screen, but the overall feel of the gameplay is pretty bland and simplistic.

Graphics: 5.5
Graphically, the blurry characters and lack of polish make the game sub-par for the DS.

Sound: 7.5
The sweeping score sounds great, but the rest of the presentation is unfortunately scant.

Difficulty:  Medium
 

Concept: 6.5
The game does take an original approach to making the most of the DS, but loses quite a bit in practice.

Overall: 6.0
While the use of the control scheme is innovative, X-Men: The Official Game is a pretty uninteresting experience.