Vimm's Lair: GameCube Reviews - Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects
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Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

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Overall:		 8.23
8.00
8.69
8.62
Votes: 26
Reviews: 1


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Reviewer: yingmin Date: Nov 27, 2018
This game could have been really good.

Graphics: 6
In-game graphics are pretty good since you can't see anything too closely. The same can not be said of the cinematics, which reveal the characters to be dead-eyed ghouls, and the FMV cutscenes look like someone tried to remake Sin City with even less budget and much less talent; both cinematics and cutscenes are surprisingly low-resolution and pixelated. Speaking of cinematics, they must have been really proud of them, because there are way too many of them, and an unforgivable number of them can't be skipped. If you get a good hit on an enemy and send it flying, cinematic. If the same happens to you, cinematic. Throw an enemy, or get thrown, cinematic. If a boss defeats you in direct combat, you get a cinematic (always the same one) of them delivering the final blow, then back to the regular game view for a second or two, then a cinematic of the boss gloating (again, each character only has one gloating cinematic), then a pan over your carcass with a message saying that you failed the mission. None of these are skippable.

Another problem with the visual side of things is the locations. You keep going back to the same locations in mission after mission, no matter which character you're using, even when it doesn't really make sense for that character to be there. Is this mission on the bridge? On top of the Daily Bugle? In the Avengers mansion? Unless they were butting up against the size limits of a Gamecube disk - which is doubtful, considering how much longer, more complex, and better looking many other GC games were - there's no excuse for recycling the same locations like this.

As a side note, the female characters are all ridiculously sexualized, even by comic book standards.

Sound: 6
The music is okay, if lacking in variety. None of the voice acting is terrible, although again, there's not nearly enough variety to prevent it from becoming annoying. Some of the sound effects get a little grating, but none are bad, per se.

Gameplay: 5
The core mechanic of the game is decent. It's a beat-em-up style in a 3D world, which can be tricky to pull off, and there are parts of the game that are fun, but like most beat-em-ups, it can get very monotonous very quickly. While the fast-paced action might be quite appealing to some, I found the episodic nature of the game to be a bit tiresome. Rarely does a single mission take more than 3-5 minutes, and several of them have time limits. There's a VS mode in addition to the story mode, but it's in the same style as the story mode, as opposed to a more traditional fighting game format. It's nice that they included such a wide range of characters, especially characters that don't often show up in video games, like Daredevil and Elektra, Human Torch and Thing. Obviously Wolverine is in the game, because he's basically Marvel's mascot. Some missions even let you play as the villains, which is kind of a pro and a con, since the way they do this doesn't give you much time to familiarize yourself with these characters.

Now that I've got the positives out of the way, here are the real problems with this game:

  • The most difficult enemy in this game is the camera. The viewing angle is too close for you to get a good idea of what's happening around you, so prepare to get shot in the back by an enemy you didn't know existed several times each mission. When you go into the rage mode, the cinematic is always from the front, regardless of what the camera angle was before, and it returns to that angle afterwards, so you have to reorient yourself every time. In fact, virtually every cinematic throws you off, especially since many of them don't even contain you at all. And, as I said earlier, cinematics happen ALL. THE. TIME.
  • There's not much variety to the fighting, since there's really only one attack button. Every character has a 2-3 move combo, which may or may not change when you add power to it.
  • Every single object in the world explodes. You'll probably spend half of every mission accidentally blowing yourself up. Some of these explosive objects will even materialize during a battle, so you're never truly safe. Sometimes you'll just bounce from explosion to explosion.
  • Pretty minor gripe, but each character has dedicated missions, rather than allowing you to choose which character to use for each mission. I understand this from a story perspective, but given that the story is awful, I would much prefer the freedom to choose your character.

    Overall: 6
    Since there's no "story" section in these reviews, I'll put that here:

    The story sucks.

    I would imagine they handled the story better in the tie-in comics, but the new characters are forgettable, the plot is idiotic, the dialogue is amateurish...I can't fathom why they created a brand new storyline for this game instead of working from source material, or letting Marvel handle the story.

    It's not irredeemably bad, and some of you might really like the bite-size, chaotic missions, but it's a far cry from the excellent games Activision made for the Gamecube based on Marvel material.