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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published January 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.
| Publisher | MacSoft |
|---|---|
| Tested on | PowerMac w/Power3D |
| Gameplay | 5 / 5 apples |
| Graphics & Sound | 5 / 5 apples |
| Interface | 5 / 5 apples |
| Difficulty | 4 / 5 apples |
| Bugs | 3 / 5 apples |
| Overall | 5 / 5 apples |
| Reviewed by | David Leinbach |
X-Men: Ravages of the Apocalypse is the prefect add-on to Quake, it adds what Quake lacks, a PLOT! This is a TOTAL conversion for Quake, that means that everything is new, all-new weapons, sound effects, music, and enemies
Gameplay
As I mentioned, this game has a plot, a rather complex one at that. The Evil Apocalypse has cloned the X-Men into his own personal army for world domination. Where do you come into this? Magneto, while no friend of the X-Men, created you, an advanced cyborg to thwart Apocalypse’s evil plans. As a cyborg, your forearms morph into 7 all-new advanced weapons to be used against the sinister X-Clones. There are 12 different X-Men will be fighting, Archangel, Beast, Bishop, Cannonball, Cyclops, Gambit, Iceman, Phoenix, Psylocke, Rogue, Storm, and Wolverine. Of course all the X-Clones have their powerful mutant powers to use against you, i.e. when fighting Wolverine make sure that he is REALLY dead, otherwise his mutant healing factor will bring him back to surprise you.
There are 18 levels in Ravages, each one is unique with it’s own puzzles and setting. There’s a real plot to follow and goals to achieve in every level.
Without a doubt, multiplayer X-Men is WAY better than plain old multiplayer Quake. In Multiplayer X-Men you can play any of the 12 X-Men and use their unique mutant powers. You can have multiplayer games with players just using their mutant powers and no guns to find out which X-Man/Woman is really the most powerful.
Screen shots
Graphics & Sound
Coming into this, I had very high standards for the graphics in this game. I can honestly say that this surpassed even my highest expectations. In pixel doubled mode, the graphics were blocky but, in regular 640 by 480, the graphics were wonderful. The real beauty is in the 3Dfx accelerated edition, what can I say except “Absolutely Beautiful!”. For your own comparison, check out my screen shots to the left, they’re all of the same scene in the different resolutions.
The music on the X-Men CD is perfect for the game, it adds just the right amount of atmosphere in. For me, the game just doesn’t seem right without this music. Sound effects for all the weapons are majestic, I’ve been reading the X-Men comics for about 4 years and the sounds in this game were just as I had always imagined them.
Interface
To play X-Men: Ravages of the Apocalypse, you launch a front-end application from which you can start a new game, start a multiplayer game, load an old game, view a cool comic-book style animated intro, and even enter in some extra “command-line parameters”. This is the first official product by the powerhouse mac porting company, Westlake Interactive, programmers from Westlake are responsible for such great Mac ports as Duke Nukem 3D, and Shadow Warrior so they knew what they were doing.
Difficulty
I have no qualms about the difficulty of X-Men, in fact I found it to be just the right balance of difficulty, a much better balance than Duke Nukem or even Normal Quake.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I found X-Men: Ravages of the Apocalypse to be the perfect add-on to Quake, I think that every Quake player out there should rush and get a copy of this! This one of the very few games that if I had a chance to remake it it, I would NOT change a thing! This is a must buy! I can not recommend this enough…
Find a copy
X-Men: Ravages of the Apocalypse has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for X-Men: Ravages of the Apocalypse on Amazon.
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