Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects is truly an imperfect game. You spend a great deal of time mashing your way through unbalanced and repetitive fights. Also there is to the game is a story mode which is similar to a standard beat-em-up, a basic versus mode, and decent on-line play for the PS2 and the Xbox. This would have been a much better game had it included a four person versus mode, but alas it was only two player.

Rise of the Imperfects definitely had some finer points. It had unlockables that were actually worth unlocking. Such as animated and narrated comics, character cards with character bios, and short videos that gave some back-story for the Imperfects. The unlockable comics kept me playing, just so I could get to see and hear the beginning of the Ultimate Fantastic Four and the Ultimate X-Men comics. You also get quite a few decent characters to unlock, such as Daredevel and Magneto.

The on-line play was also nicely implemented. Playing against humans cut out some of the bugs I’ll talk about later. It also had a decent stat and rank scoring system. Best of all there didn’t seem to be any lag while playing on-line, which made the entire experience much more enjoyable. Marvel Nemesis also had some incredible style. The menus were well thought out, and made you feel as if you were in for a great game.

Unfortunately, as I said, the game was imperfect. The primary story to the game was played out through a beat-em-up style game that threw hundreds of drones at you, and eventually would end up with a boss battle. You could choose from one of four characters to make your way through the story. The constant wave of drones was usually too easy, but that could change in a moment. At times the difficulty level would spike to nearly impossible, and you would have to try over and over to beat a certain area. One that comes to mind was a boss battle between Wolverine and Storm. Storm would keep her distance and fire constant projectiles at Wolverine making it near impossible to defeat her and usually dispatching him quite quickly.

You faced a small variety of drones throughout the game, most of which were revealed early on, and were quite easy to defeat. There were your standard foes that attacked with basic physical attacks, ones who shot at you, enemies who smashed the ground, and even ones who would grab you and explode. There were also flying enemies that were quite difficult to hit. The only way I found to quickly dispose of the flying foes was to jump into the air and throw them. That would usually take them out with one hit. They were pretty frustrating until I figured that little trick out. None of the enemies were really that intelligent. They would perform super attacks in the wrong direction, and even jump off cliffs. This helped make things easier at times, but also took some of the fun out of the game.

The level design was pretty decent overall. For the most part you had rather large levels, and just about everything was destructible. If your character was strong enough, say like the Think, you could throw a car across the arena and strike your enemy with it. If the car had taken enough damage, then it would explode causing some major damage to your enemy. You could also throw other exploding objects, or light poles, telephone booths, or just about anything else that you found laying around in the levels. Unfortunately there were not many levels, and you found yourself battling the same minions in the same levels, over and over again. There wasn’t a great deal of detail to the environments, but that was fine because the focus was on the characters, which really looked good.

The characters were dark, and great detail was taken to make them look and move as authentic as possible. Some could fly around the stage, such as Iron Man or Magneto. Wolverine could pull out his claws, and venom looked pretty intimidating up close. Spiderman moved with speed and grace, and could even web-sling. The new characters, the Imperfects, also looked pretty cool and seemed to fit into the Marvel Universe quite nicely. My biggest complaint with the characters was that so many of them seemed to play the same.

The control was handled pretty well when it came to the versus battles, but felt awkward when you were in the beat-em-up levels. They kept things simple, and at times simple can be good. I believe things would have felt more comfortable in the beat-em-up levels had there been some sort of lock-on. A good deal of the time when I was using projectiles I found myself attacking a car sitting next to my enemy than actually attacking my enemy. Also the fighting engine didn’t work that well when being attacked by multiple foes. I would usually jump away, and try to take them on one by one.

Being a Marvel Comics fan for a good portion of my life, I went into this game really wanting to love it. And I was disappointed. There were levels where I could dispatch all the enemies without taking a hit, and there were other levels that I had to play dozens of times in an almost futile attempt to defeat them. I also felt as if this game was designed with four player melee combat in mind. And if they had made this a four player game, then I would probably have been much more satisfied with it. But what we got was a half thought out beat-em-up game with a decent 3d fighter that was much to unbalanced to be any real fun.