5 Terrible Superhero Games

When you think of the X-Men what's the first thing that pops into you head? If we took a poll I'd feel safe saying that most people think of cool superpowers. The X-Men are iconic and each member fits a specialized role on the team defined by their powers. Wolverine can cut you up real bad, Cyclops can annoy you to death with needless speech, Colossus is Russian and so on.

The idea of an X-Men video game makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, The Uncanny X-Men on the NES is terrible. So terrible in fact that many people consider it one of the worst video games to grace the system. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's damn close and at least in the top 5.

The game had some interesting feature for the time including the ability for two player to play at the same time. While the NES had two controllers, so many game just had players take turns. I remember that if a game was announced and it included a simultaneous two-player mode, the gaming magazines would freak out.

It sucks that the gamplay was just pure trash. The two-player mode was always on and if you didn't have a friend the computer A.I. would take over. If you think partner A.I. in 2019 is bad, imagine how broken it was in 1988. Your best bet was to let your partner die right off the bat so you could play.

The characters themselves also didn't match their comic counterparts they are based on. You get a top-down view and you mutants run around attacking. Basic stuff, but the implementation is hot garbage. The only characters that matter iare Cyclops and Ice-Man because they can shoot stuff.

Anyone without a projectile would simply punch in from on them about the length of a pixel. This means if you wanted to kill someone you'd essentially bump into them a lot. It looked as stupid as it sounds. Stages were really bland and confusing to navigate with some being downright gross to look at.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is a fantastic animated film in the awesome Batman Beyond universe. The video game tie-in is just pure trash that has gone down as not only one of the worst Batman games of all time, but one of the worst games to ever grace the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation.

The game is based on the movie but instead of the team creating a futuristic world that you could explore as Batman, they figure they'd just make the game a classic beat 'em up. Okay, not the worst idea even if the genre was pretty much dead and nearly non-existent on the Nintendo 64.

Gameply was really cramped, which is weird for a character like Batman Beyond that is known for flying all over the place. Enemies are incredibly generic and the stage designs are simply paint by numbers. Walk to the right, beat up some thugs, find a key and move on.

The game was billed as having a fully featured combo system but fell victim to button mashing to beat up enemies. The path of least resistance kills games like this. If I can simply punch a guy to death with a single button what incentive do I have to learn any sort of combos?

Then there are the gadgets that Batman Beyond is known for. And while they are pretty cool, you'll never find yourself using them because, again, punching and kicking enemies like a child on the playground is more effective. Hell, your punch is more powerful than some of the special abilities you earn. And you won't be needing those abilities and the alternate suits you have access to because the enemies are stupid.

There are so many times when you walk into a room and the enemies just stand there without ever approaching, watching you beat up their friends. And then there's the single 30-second audio track with a guitar riff that is on a loop all game. This is nothing more than a shin-kicking simulator. Seriously, everything about this one is bad and has little to no redeeming value.

Acclaim did a lot of terrible licensed superhero games that could fill a list like this a few times over. The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga is on such title that showed the publisher simply wanted to eek out maximum returns for very little investment. And that shows as The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga is painfully bland, boring and downright terrible.

Hulk games are tough to get right. The idea of someone like the Hulk dying from being shot or punched a few times by some dudes with sticks and peashooters feels crazy. But in this game you are going to be dying so many times it's crazy. But that's part of the magic that they licensed games work on the player.

Why build a long, deep and interesting adventure game when we can make only a few stages (five in total) and simply make them really hard so it takes you forever to complete. This can work in other games but not with someone that is supposed to be the most powerful being in the universe.

Graphically the game looks like vomit. It's from a time where studios didn't understand the idea of 3D and were still playing around with concepts. So you get a 3D environment but a 2D character. This works well in 2.5D games but The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga is a fully open game. This makes connecting with enemies a real pain.

The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga isn't the worst game around, it's just one that lacked any heart and was simply released to make a quick buck off a cheap license. This was a time when Marvel was just about bankrupt so any money was good money, and so we got a lot of crappy games.

Iron Man changed the movie world and set up what is now the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The video game based on the movie is terrible and does nothing to get you to want to go and see the film. It looks bad, plays bad and doesn't make you feel like Iron Man in any way.

The game is really short and you won't find more than a few hours of gameplay. There just isn't much to experience in Iron Man on the Wii. You spend most of the time hovering around and shooting at whatever it is your pointing at. There just isn't anything here to keep a player invested. Add in the weird glitches and you have a lackluster and frustrating experience.

The only interesting thing of note here is that the team got the voice talents of Robert Downey Jr and Terrance Howard to reprise their roles. It's a shame they did have a voice over director on staff to give them any sort of direction as they sound flat and stilted.

Everything about this feels cheap and rushed. It's amazing how Sega could turn playing out the adventures of Iron Man and turn in into a snooze fest. Graphics are ugly and the game uses lost of storms to hide the terrible drae-distance meaning the game looks even worse during these segments.

You can't really have a list like this and not feature what is know as Superman 64. The game is actually known as Superman: The New Superman Adventures but this isn't made clear so we don't blame you for simply calling it Superman 64. It's probably a bad start when your game can't even get its own name right.

The game had Superman in a virtual world beating up virtual robots that could kill him, because reasons. It's one of the same problems I have with the Hulk game as there really isn't much, outside of Kryptonite and magic, that can even leave hurt Superman.

But the real shame here is that the game was never intended to be this bad. The developers had a strict mandate when working with the Superman license that made creating a serious game almost out of the question. The virtual world was a mandate, fighting on robots was a mandate and so on.

The game faced a six-month delay, not because the game needed fixing, nut because that's how long it took for DC Comics to give final approval on the game. Everything about this is painful, so much so that you really start feeling bad for the developers and anyone that worked on this one.

The team knew this one was a train-wreck from top to bottom. So when it was time to port the game to the PlayStation they decided to throw everything out an start a game for scratch. Sony was all on-board for the title but the DC license expired and the couldn't get it back. DC wanted to move even though the game sucked mostly because of them.