PixlBit

The Uncanny X-Men are one of the most recognizable superhero teams in the Marvel universe, all one billion of them. The team spread from the pages onto toys, cartoons, articles of clothing, and even video games. There have been a variety of X-Men games on the market but there was one Quake total conversion for retail that caught the attention from my dad and I, but due to some technical difficulties for one strange reason or another we never had a chance to play it. Thanks to the Internet I finally found X-Men: Ravages of Apocalypse and downloaded it as soon as the title hit my mind again like an adamantium bar. After playing the game it is safe to say that the mod is as uncanny as the X-Men themselves.

The story begins within the Citadel of Apocalypse, where the mutant god himself, Apocalypse, has managed to capture the X-Men. With the help of the obvious silhouette behind him, Mister Sinister, they began cloning an army to devastate the world. No one was in their way, not even other Marvel superheroes, just like in the Paramount movies. Their plan would have started without a hitch, but Mister Sinister made one fatal mistake: he had one of his goons document the cloning process using a fourth generation video camera that records on metallic oxide tape, something that Master of Magnetism could read even from space. Upon learning their plan Magneto devised a counter-attack: he infused a volunteer with advance augmentation to become a literal killing machine with the power to form and assimilate weapons through his arms by mere thought. The Cyborg was then sent forth to stop the duo and paved the way for Magneto’s own conquest to save the world.

The story is bit on the nonsensical side and there’s a reason for this. Development of the game started when Jonny Gorden of Zero Gravity Entertainment was experimenting with Quake, replacing the enemies with a number of X-Men characters. Soon enough word got around and Marvel was suddenly interested in the project. When contracted by Marvel Interactive at the time Gorden had to come up with a reason why the player would shoot multiple instances of these characters. While the story is very unusual it would make an interesting What If tale if some changes were made.

When starting on the first level the most noticeable thing about the gameplay is how difficult it is. Instead of choosing a difficulty level you’re actually selecting how much punishment you want. The clones are completely ruthless and will stop at nothing to kill The Cyborg. If there is anything to admire about them it’s how they are perfectly copied when compared to the originals. Wolverine for example has actual bone claws and a healing factor that will bring him back up sometime after you have “killed” him.

The Cyborg has a variety of weapons preinstalled in his body, ranging from a trusty shotgun hand to the Nuclear Energy Radiation Dispatcher (essentially the B.F.G. if it was a literal hand cannon). Scattered throughout the levels are the parts to build the Super Weapon, which is used to disable Apocalypse and Mister Sinister’s invincibility mode. When fighting the clones the weapons are more about effectiveness over preference. Not only do the clones have weaknesses but they have high resistance to certain ammo types, such as Bishop can take little damage to fuel based with his power of energy absorption and Angel can shield himself from the missile-launcher with his Celestial Wings.

There a few powerups that makes it easier to kill. The first powerup you’ll find is Superpower, which is Quad Damage in this game. The next one is Rapidfire, changing your semi-automatic fire into a constant stream of bullets. While it speeds up killing the brutal clones it does cause you to go through your ammo reserve quickly. Finally there’s the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak, the Pentagram of Protection replacement. I say replacement but that’s only in context of model design and name. It does not give you the powers of The Juggernaut, though that might be because The Cyborg wouldn’t know the full chant to gain such power.

Before I move onto the designs and presentations I want to go on record that I didn’t have the music on during gameplay. When I downloaded the mod I didn’t take the time to burn the context onto a CD, nor did I create a file or input a command (if there is one.) in the autoexec.cfg file to load the context of the folder, if the music is somewhere in there. But since this is a mod for Quake you can put in your own music CD. Moving into to character designs the clones themselves look like a mix of the 90s costumes with some other inspirations. I actually like the direction they went with, and it looks great on Quake models. As for the player model I’ve sent Gorden a couple emails, one asking about The Cyborg since I have no experience in extracting models and skins. He wrote that he originally didn’t want to use a model because he felt that the player would be more immersed in the game if they put themselves as the main character. But as the game was close to being completed he remembered he needed to add multiplayer to the game so he came up with this handsome devil.

The look of the levels have this Quake-esque feel to it. They may not look like the fantastic modern/futuristic theme of Marvel but for a Quake mod it set to mood to what your mission is. Unfortunately nothing good can be said about the sinister level design. Most of the levels came from the American McGee School of Level design, only taken up to a villainous level with overly shadowed corridors and maze-like designs riddled with traps, a few unconventional puzzles, and a requirement to find parts to the super weapons needed to fight the chapter bosses that are sometimes hidden in said puzzles before moving on to the next level.

Overall the game had some good ideas despite how development went. The story was an interesting idea, the art design of the characters and levels felt right for a Quake mod, and some of the gameplay had a good approach to the circumstance of what if you had to fight the X-Men with guns. That didn’t help outweigh the problems, however. Difficulty levels are not accurate, the clones are unjustly merciless, and the levels are littered with over-complicated layouts with traps, puzzles, and darkness, and the story and presentation left some questions.

But is the game worth playing through as a challenge? As flawed as this game may be I actually like the concept and had some anticipation of it being a good mod when I booted it up. As I said before I contacted Jonney Gorden and in the first email I asked him if he felt this game was developed too soon or the people were right about it being too hard. When I received a response from him he mentioned that he quickly installed the modded game and played it out on normal difficulty to be sure. He failed twice on the first level. In his email he wrote that there was a fine line between challenge and too much difficulty and the player should gradually be challenged instead of having it all thrown at their screens. If the player can’t beat the first level then it wouldn’t be rated it as a good game, he added.

He continued to state that if the team had a bigger budget and more time the game would have had the issues resolved. In another email he mentioned that if he posed the question “What would make a great X-Men game?” before doing the modding itself the game would have been different. Sometime after Ravages of Apocalypse was released he had ideas for a new X-Men game with that question in mind. They started on a sequel with the idea and were working towards a team based RPG where the X-Men would fight villains. Sadly this will never be released. When they started development Activision acquired all rights to Marvel games and development was moved in-house.

The sequel may never happen but I at least would recommend trying the mod out if only for the multiplayer. It’s worth just knowing what the game is like and see how much it can improve. While the game may be a mess it’s the only game where you can frag En Sabah Nur and Nathaniel Essex to win one for Magneto’s world domination. Let the Brotherhood unite.

ZGE Portfolio and download page for X-Men: Ravages of Apocalypse can be found here.

Jonny Gorden's reply to my previous email to him can be found here.