Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Review

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Where Rise of the Silver Surfer attempts to stand out is in the use of Fusion Attacks. When characters are nearby, you can hold the left trigger and unleash a team-up assault by combining powers. The combinations soon wear thin though, and the attacks themselves aren't much more powerful than if you'd simply unleashed them separately. It's a nice enough idea, though hardly revolutionary, but it feels under developed. You can only ever combine two heroes, for instance. There's no ultimate attack where all four can work together.

What's especially weird is that this is a superhero game that doesn't like letting you be a superhero. Even when levelled up to the max, your energy runs out at a ridiculous rate, forcing you to fall back on punch, punch, punch while it refills. The Invisible Woman, for example, can remain invisible for 15 seconds at her highest level. Human Torch can fly for about the same amount of time. The Thing can use his ground-pounding Shockwave attack nine times before his tank runs dry - and as this is the only move you really need to finish most of the levels, it's sadly obvious why such restrictions have been placed on your powers.

This means that the gameplay falls into an uninspiring routine of POWER! POWER! POWER! WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! POWER! POWER! POWER! Health runs out equally quickly, with even the super-tough Thing able to be stopped in his tracks by one laser blast or knocked on his arse by the smallest foe. Not that this matters, since it's virtually impossible to actually die. Run out of health and you switch to another character. Defeated characters revive in about ten seconds (yes, really) and then you just switch back and carry on smashing. This makes the sporadic boss fights particularly easy, since all you need to do is use The Thing until he keels over, swap to Human Torch, fly around evading the enemy for a few seconds, then return to The Thing for renewed clobbering. The game only ends if you're stupid enough to let all four characters "die" at the same time and this is practically impossible to do. Believe me, I actually tried to deliberately kill all four characters and only managed it once.

One of the Fusion Attacks in progress. More trouble than they're worth, to be honest.

All told, the occasional Mysterio Moment dead end aside, the game's seventeen sections should take most averagely skilled gamers an afternoon to plough through, at most, and it ends on a shockingly anti-climactic note that I really hope hasn't been taken from the movie. As with any relentless and shallow beat-'em-up, it's more fun as a co-op experience - but you can only play with real live people, with Xbox Live people curiously absent. Elsewhere, even Achievement whores hoping for a rental that will easily boost their total are destined for disappointment. The tasks required to clock up the points are far from difficult, but they do require enough patience to play through the game multiple times, levelling up all the characters and collecting all the secret tokens.