Over the last several decades, there have been dozens of video game adaptations of various Marvel comics. Whether it’s X-Men, The Avengers, Spider-Man, or one of the many other heroes in that universe, it’s proven to be a popular source for game developers. Thankfully, the quality of those games has been steadily improving. These days, we get great adaptations like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Unfortunately, it didn’t always used to be that way. Especially in the early days of the video game industry, those adaptations were messy, glitch-filled slogs.
Here are the five worst Marvel games, ranked from bad to worst.
5) X-Men: Destiny
X-Men: Destiny sounded great on paper. You’d create your own mutant and have them join the X-Men for an action RPG romp through the memorable world of mutants. It was written by Mike Carey, who is best known for his work on the X-Men: Legacy series. And publisher Activision was bringing in Silicon Knights to develop, which was coming off the disappointing Too Human, but had found success with innovative games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
Unfortunately, the promised character creator was limited to a few archetypes, limiting your own creativity. The story, which the developers promised would value player choice, was largely boring and didn’t really deliver on making your decisions matter. I’ll grant that there are probably technically worse Marvel games, but none were as disappointing as Destiny. It seemingly had so much promise and then launched as a half-finished failure.
4) Spider-Man (1982)
Look, it was tough for anybody making a licensed game on the Atari 2600. We’ve all seen how awful ET was. They had to bury copies of that game, for goodness sake. Unfortunately for Marvel, Spider-Man is in that same boat.
It is a notoriously bad game, which isn’t great considering it’s the first game to feature Spider-Man and the first Marvel game ever made. You wouldn’t call it a looker, and the gameplay is simplistic even for the Atari. You have to give the team a little grace because of how new gaming was, but this is one nobody needed to play.
3) Silver Surfer (1990)
Let’s start with the positive. Software Creations’ Silver Surfer had great music on the NES. That’s about as far as the praise goes. See, Silver Surfer is widely remembered as one of the hardest games of its time. However, that doesn’t necessarily come from great design or challenging enemies.
Instead, you’ll have trouble because it’s nearly impossible to know what’s going to damage you. Silver Surfer‘s enemy and level design frustratingly mix. One wall might be fine to fly through, while the next will deal damage. It’s nonsensical and leaves you feeling exasperated. Difficulty, when done well, can be a selling point. Here, it’s a reason to never pick up the controller.
2) Iron Man (2008)
The video game adaptation of Iron Man‘s first movie benefited from having Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard in the voice booth, but I’m not sure if it helped either actor’s career. Movie tie-in games have always been a rough sell. So many of them are downright terrible. As you’d expect from its spot on this list, Iron Man is no different.
It was widely panned by critics and players for its simplistic, repetitive gameplay. Each level plays out the same way: You watch a cutscene featuring badly animated versions of the film characters, and then have to go blow up a few random enemies. Even worse, those enemies respawn constantly, quickly turning everything into a slog. Sure, the missions are relatively easy, but it’s so boring that you won’t want to bother finishing this one.
1) The Uncanny X-Men (1989)
Image courtesy of Marvel
You might think an action-platformer that lets you play as one of six X-Men on the NES would have a chance to be good. Unfortunately, you must not be familiar with publisher LJN’s game. See, the studio was well-known for churning out absolute garbage based on popular IP. The Uncanny X-Men is no different.
Sure, you could technically play as one of six different mutants, but they are almost all functionally the same. Three of them hit with puny punches, while the other three can fire projectiles. Oh, Storm and Iceman can fly, but any time you use that power, you drain your own health. It only gets worse when you pick a character.
There are five levels to play through, but they’re all muddy messes of game design that don’t connect in any tangible way. Technically, there is a hidden level where you fight Magneto, but if you want to find it, you’ll need to solve one of the more convoluted puzzles of all time.
Nowadays, it’s easy to find thanks to Google, but if you were playingin ’89, you needed to kill a certain number of specific enemies to get a screen to pop up at the end of each level. Those all contained different parts of a hidden message, which pointed you toward the cover art. Putting those two together, you’d learn the code, but let me be the first to tell you that the work was not worth it. You’d be better off doing almost anything else.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!