The Fantastic Four is one of the original super hero teams in Marvel, even before the X-men and the Avengers. If you're a fan of the Fantastic Four, you probably have your favorite on the team. Mine is definitely the Human Torch because he's awesome. Now, when it comes to the Fantastic Four movies, this is quite a different story. The original movie, which was never released but leaked to the public through comic cons, was an absolute atrocity. It was made with some heart, but not a lot of money nor talent behind the camera. It made all of the characters parodies of themselves, especially Doctor Doom.
Then there are the Fantastic Four movies from the 2000's, which is where our game today is from. These movies were not horrific, but they certainly weren't gems on the franchise's face. They were kind of lame, the CGI was dated even for the time, and the stories were all over the place. Chris Evans does great as Human Torch, Michael Chiklis was good as the Thing and the cast were decent overall. Sometimes, they did their homework well, but the movies still missed the mark in several ways. While they did Silver Surfer justice in both Laurence Fishburne as the voice and Doug Jones as the CGIed body, they crapped the bed with Galactus being a galactic fart ball. They were divisive and not especially endearing. Still, they had their own charm and had some good parts along with a bit of feeling.
The same cannot be said about the 2015 movie, nor the subject of today's article, the Fantastic Four for the Playstation 2. If you want a good Fantastic Four video game, I'm sorry to say that you should keep dreaming, because there has never been even a decent attempt at such. This game kind of fell in my lap to play, because I forgot they were still doing movie tie-ins in the early 2000's. Besides this game and the Rise of the Silver Surfer game, there is literally no other mention of another Fantastic Four game.
This title is said to be an action adventure beat'em up. Sure, why not? Either way, it's so boring that I've gone three whole paragraphs into this review and I've barely even talked about the actual game itself! It's so by the numbers! You play all four characters of the team, they have different powers and ways of playing, but it's still so mundane. You run through levels, fight robots and weird creatures, that's basically it. There are stealth sections and collectathons but it does very little to add to the title. There's hardly any impact, no real engaging storyline and you'll be begging for the Simpsons or X-men arcade games.
All of this would be more forgiveable if there wasn't so much potential lost. The fact is that you have fire powers, strong man powers, invisibility and stretchy powers; none of it has any real substance at all. The graphics are horrendous, even for the Playstation 2, though you can argue that even the movie didn't have that great of CGI either. At this point, we can at least forgive it for that, as it has become clear that movie tie-in games were given ridiculously terrible deadlines in order to release around the time of the movie it represented. We can sit around talking about how much this game is garbage and throw it off as a wasted effort, but really, what were we expecting?
I wasn't expecting much when I came into this game. I couldn't finish it for obvious reasons, but it wasn't unplayable and there were some fun little mechanics when it came to their unique fighting powers. Beyond that, though, it tried to follow the movie and add random robots and monsters to make up for the fact that the movie itself was sadly devoid of action of any sort. It's a decent attempt with what they were given and the obvious deadlines they needed to reach, but that still makes it fall into the extremely long list of duds of the movie tie-in era. Thankfully, movie tie-in games are extremely rare, almost to the point of being null and void. Until then, just read the old comics and drink water.
