At around the 2/3 point of this game (which is when the difficulty started to really ratchet up) I didn't have a good impression of this; my chief gripe was its seemingly poor balancing and difficulty. It was all over the place; I'd lost so many lives on the 3rd level boss but beat the 4th level boss without trying, and there were so many instances of breezing through long stretches only to hit a brick wall that seemed more a function of poor balancing than an intentional difficulty spike. But after playing a bit more, I had my 'Eureka' moment and realized that this was actually a feature of one of the game's strengths.
There are seven playable mutants (up from four in the previous game), all with different movesets, strengths and weaknesses. Most sections that are difficult with one character can be trivialized by another, and the game encourages you to find the optimal character for each section by letting you change characters at every checkpoint (and whenever you lose a life). In other words, this is a game rewards your familiarity with the characters' capabilities by making you feel like a badass when you pick Magneto and can just levitate over the projectiles that were absolute hell to dodge as Beast.
Where it stumbles is in the finer points of execution. The game feels weird, and for lack of a better word, a little 'off'. The hit detection is a bit strange and I could never get the hang of the timing of the mercy invincibility. I frequently walked off platforms while trying to jump off the edge (something that rarely ever happens to me). The game also seems to suffer from the occasional dropped input during the more frantic segments, with Cyclops' optic blast a common culprit; I charge it up, release the 'A' button and then nothing happens. The levels also feel rather bland; while I didn't find anything particularly egregious in their design (except Savage Land - that can lick my armpit), they weren't that interesting and dragged on for way too long. The final level in particular is a marathon and the placement of hazards and enemies at the edge of the slowly-scrolling screen seems deliberately structured to slow you to a crawl.
I wish the game were more interesting; they didn't need to overcomplicate the arcade feel of the game when they already had a ready-made way to add flavor in the form of the large cast. If they went all-in on this and created obstacles that had to be traversed differently by different characters, or even some branching paths, it would have added a ton of replayability and made it feel like less of a chore at times. As it is, it's already one of the better superhero games on the Genesis but could have been even more!
There are seven playable mutants (up from four in the previous game), all with different movesets, strengths and weaknesses. Most sections that are difficult with one character can be trivialized by another, and the game encourages you to find the optimal character for each section by letting you change characters at every checkpoint (and whenever you lose a life). In other words, this is a game rewards your familiarity with the characters' capabilities by making you feel like a badass when you pick Magneto and can just levitate over the projectiles that were absolute hell to dodge as Beast.
Where it stumbles is in the finer points of execution. The game feels weird, and for lack of a better word, a little 'off'. The hit detection is a bit strange and I could never get the hang of the timing of the mercy invincibility. I frequently walked off platforms while trying to jump off the edge (something that rarely ever happens to me). The game also seems to suffer from the occasional dropped input during the more frantic segments, with Cyclops' optic blast a common culprit; I charge it up, release the 'A' button and then nothing happens. The levels also feel rather bland; while I didn't find anything particularly egregious in their design (except Savage Land - that can lick my armpit), they weren't that interesting and dragged on for way too long. The final level in particular is a marathon and the placement of hazards and enemies at the edge of the slowly-scrolling screen seems deliberately structured to slow you to a crawl.
I wish the game were more interesting; they didn't need to overcomplicate the arcade feel of the game when they already had a ready-made way to add flavor in the form of the large cast. If they went all-in on this and created obstacles that had to be traversed differently by different characters, or even some branching paths, it would have added a ton of replayability and made it feel like less of a chore at times. As it is, it's already one of the better superhero games on the Genesis but could have been even more!