 SEGA DRUNK My favorite thing about X-Men 2, The Clone Wars, is right when you start the game, there's no title screen, no menu, no text, no nothing. You turn on your Genesis and you're dropped as a random X-Men character into a snowy 2D platforming landscape fighting bad guys to the death. That is awesome, why can't more games do this? You advance through the stage and then you get to the title screen. Yeah, that's right, you have to earn that screen, damn it. I reviewed the first X-Men game a long while back, and it really took me a while to come up with ways to phrase how that game can still be pretty good even though objectively the gameplay isn't all that great, so there was a lot of hand-wringing and stuff that had to be apologetically phrased. Thankfully, I don't have to do that with X-Men 2, The Clone Wars, this game is just flat out good. Everything that made the first X-Men game good is all here, the number of mutants, the fun use of mutant powers, the villains, the perfect use of that early 90s X-Men color palette, and it's corrected most of the mistakes that game made, like the iffy platforming and the annoying sound design. Even better, this time around there's no limit to how often you use your mutant power, which is really smart, because I mean, that's why people play X-Men games, right? Not to punch and kick like any other game. People want to blast stuff with Cyclops and blow stuff up with Gambit and teleport with Nightcrawler. Some mutant powers can even be charged to a certain extent if you have enough health. But yeah, the same four X-Men are back from the original game, Wolverine Gambit Cyclops and Nightcrawler, in addition to Psylocke and Beast being playable characters. Oh, and there's one more guy you can get after the third level, but I don't want to spoil it. I'll just say it's a long time coming, being able to finally play as him. What makes this game really great, though, is that each of these characters aren't just alterations of the same basic sprite. Yeah, they have unique powers, but they also all have unique speeds, sizes, and ranges of motion that are accurate reflections of that particular mutant. So after you play X-Men 2, for a while, you start to get a feel for each character. So by proxy, you get a feel for which character works for each level, whether it's the brute strength of Beast, Nightcrawler's dexterity and agility, Wolverine's resilience or Gambit's speed. This really adds a lot of replay value to the game. There's hidden areas you can discover. It's the smaller, more detailed stuff like that that sets this game apart. I have to mention, of course, that this game is multiplayer as well. However, that brings about the game's biggest flaw, and that it's pretty frustrating to play with a second player because the screen doesn't always know where it wants to scroll, or if it wants to scroll at all, so that can get kinda tiresome. The game's story mirrors the story that was going on in the comics at the time, which was the Phalanx story arc. No, not this guy. It's this kind of techno-organic virus that indiscriminately spreads very easily through all sorts of living matter, sort of like the Borg, but in virus form. The Phalanx is trying to assimilate Earth, and the X-Men travel through all sorts of familiar settings you might recognize, like Magneto's Mutant Haven Avalon, or the Savage Land, and of course you run into a potpourri of villains, everyone from Exodus to Deathbird to Apocalypse. I mentioned earlier that the sound design is much improved from the first game, but the soundtrack especially steps it up big time, with all sorts of memorable tracks that fit the game flawlessly, and a good soundtrack, like this really goes a long way toward adding that much more energy to the action, and it works awesome here. The soundtrack here is so good that it got released on CD as part of the Sega Tunes series. So yeah, while the first X-Men Genesis game appealed strictly to X-Men fans, X-Men 2 The Clone Wars appeals to everyone, and if you're into X-Men, you're gonna like it that much more. In all likelihood, this is the best X-Men video game I've ever played on console, sorry, nothing on top of the four-player arcade game, but yeah, this goes beyond just the regular licensed gaming stuff. Sure, it's awesome to play as your favorite mutants and fight the familiar villains, but they really got everything right from giving every mutant a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses, creating huge levels that allow you to utilize all sorts of mutant powers, and allowing the player to play however they want. Want to blow shit up? Play as Gambit. Want to go berserker on their ass? Play as Wolverine. Want to sneak around? Play as Nightcrawler. It's frickin' great, and it's one of the best games on the Genesis.