 Marvel Superheroes War of the Gems certainly sounds like it should be a good game, on paper there's a lot to like, it's from Capcom, and they rarely did wrong back then. The game certainly looks nice, the music is cool, the story layout here is based on the Infinity Gauntlet series, where Adam Warlock calls for the help of his Superhero buddies to seek out the powerful Infinity Gems before they fall into the wrong hands. Wait, what is this, Final Fantasy to beat him up? Anyway yeah, I know the arcade game has the same story, but this is not a port, it's original for the Super Nintendo, and instead of being a straight ahead beat him up the game is structured the same way as X-Men Mutant Apocalypse, where you've got 5 superheroes to choose from to play 4 stages in any order before unlocking the final stage. Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, Wolverine, and Spider-Man are all playable characters here, and again just like Mutant Apocalypse the gameplay utilizes a couple street fighter style commands to do special attacks, so that's cool. Sadly War of the Gems has a fatal flaw, the level design. This is some of the most half-assed design I can ever remember seeing. I mean you've got these cool-assed comic book superheroes with badass powers, and what does the game have you do with them? Smash walls. Smash lots and lots of walls. The basic gist of each level is walk to the right until it stops scrolling, come to a clearing, beat up 3 or 4 enemies, then keep going. Maybe a wall gets in the way every so often that you have to smash, sometimes you'll have to jump a couple times. Alright, the game's not that bad, I just want to get across the point that this game plays very dull, and a large part of that is because of the level design. It's still somewhat fun in a beat-em-up sort of way, and there is a little bit of platforming here, but it still comes across as lifeless. Mutant Apocalypse at least has some parts that allow the mutants to take advantage of their agility, like beast hanging from the ceiling, or gambit and Psylocke having plenty of opportunities to show off their quickness, or to just have something that allows them to take advantage of their mutant abilities. Instead, War of the Gems has stuff like the aquarium level, where you're stuck underwater moving in slow motion and you guessed it, smashing walls. Oh, and you have to move as quickly as you can, or you'll run out of oxygen. Come on, I thought the whole point of a superhero game like this was to do cool superhero stuff, not kick down barriers at half speed. Trying to stay positive here, the superhero sprites are at least really well done. Spider-Man and Wolverine can climb walls, that's pretty cool. Gats in America and Spider-Man can attack from a distance with projectile attacks, and it's cool finally being able to play as Iron Man in an SNES game. There's also a training room here that converts the game into a one-on-one fighting game. Although it's not all that good, because it plays so slowly. It uses beat-em-up mechanics, of course, instead of traditional fighting game mechanics. Maybe the best feature this game offers is that there's potential alternate paths that can be opened up if you finish a level with a certain character, so that's a nice touch. And hey, the pixel art for these cut scenes is freaking sweet, too. Really, if all you're interested in is just playing as your favorite superheroes here, then I'm not going to slag on anyone for that. I mean, the game gets the job done in that aspect. I mean, yeah, War of the Gems looks cool, sounds good, the music is nicely done, the hit detection and all that are fine. It's just the layouts to do all this stuff in, make the game fall completely flat. If you're looking for a Marvel superhero game on the Super Nintendo, X-Men Mutant Apocalypse is so much better. Or Maximum Carnage, or Separation Anxiety, or hell, I'd personally rather play X-Men and Spider-Man in Arcade's Revenge rather than this. But hey, if you just want to smash walls with the Hulk, go for it. There's plenty of them here.