The Darwin Awards are filled with things that really weren't good ideas: bungee-jumping with a steel cable, trying to uproot a tree with your car, and pretty much anything involving alcohol and explosives, or a combination thereof. While videogames don't really have their own equivalent, it doesn't take a genius to imagine that Darwin himself would nominate X-Men 3: The Official Game for such a (dis)honour. This is gaming de-evolution at its worst, and were the saying 'survival of the shittest', this quite possibly would be the only survivor on Xbox 360.

Movie tie-ins always seem like a good idea on paper: you've got a multi-million dollar film with its own huge advertising budget, contractually obliged actors as voice-talent, film-footage and behind-the-scenes goodies for your unlockables, the story's already written and every asset you could possibly need at your disposal due to close collaboration during the production. Sometimes, like with King Kong it works really well, other times, not so well. But so long as you follow this formula, you're guaranteed of producing something halfway decent.

Deviating from the formula is not a good idea. You may garner some praise for taking a risk (like Enter The Matrix) if you do a solid job of it, but more often than not your successes will be limited. 'Limited' doesn't quite cover X-Men 3: The Official Game. In fact, on virtually every front it is possible to fail, this game does. You can stop reading now if you want, so long as you promise to avoid it at all costs. If you aren't still convinced, then pray do carry on, gentle reader.

To begin with, X-Men 3: The Official Game actually has nothing to do with the movie at all. They've had to subtitle it 'The Official Game' just so you don't get confused there, because aside from some pictures of Wolverine and Iceman with their X-Men 3: The Last Stand looks, you'd never be able to tell. The story takes place somewhere between the second and third film, after Stryker is defeated, and Jean Grey has 'died' saving the X-Men from drowning.

Billing this as a prologue to the third film is probably how the developers pitched it, but the end result is a game that feels like it has nothing to do with the reason most people would be buying it. The choice of playable characters is perhaps the most unfathomable of all mistakes: everyone is sick of Wolverine after X-Men 2: Wolverine's Revenge; he's had his day in the sun. Iceman is hardly the most popular X-Person, and Nightcrawler isn't even in the latest bloody movie! Maybe we've been spoilt by the two X-Men: Legends games, but a roster of 3 characters, one old, one boring, and one irrelevant is pretty pathetic. The same is true of the villains: both Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike have been done to death, quite literally in Deathstrike's case. Aside from them, Multiple Man is the only new character from the film included in the game in any tangible way.

The story, then, has something to do with the Master Mold - basically a giant Sentinel producing floating factory - being activated inside the Weapon X facility by the also-presumed-dead Jason Stryker. It's up to the three X-Men and a few non-playable offsiders to stop this nefarious plan before it interferes with the plot of the third movie. The plot itself isn't too bad for an X-Men game, it certainly lacks the epic scope of X-Men 2: Rise of Apocalypse, but it does have its moments. The problem is really the lack of cinematic context: aside from a few principal characters, there are no familiar locations or set-piece battles for players to relate to.

Yet as soon as you start playing the game, you'll quickly realize this is the least of the game's problems. Each character plays in a distinct manner, and none of them do it well. Let's start with Wolverine, since he makes up the bulk of the missions. His is a third-person brawler game, with limited camera control and the least exciting repertoire of moves and combos you could probably ever expect from this kind of fighting game. During the course of his game, he will face 3 types of enemies: one who you beat with the X button, one with the Y button, and one by using a jump attack. Thrilling. It's really hard to imagine how the developers could take one of the most popular X-Men who has had dozens of videogame incarnations, and make it worse than anything prior to this point. One might sneer at Z-Axis' pedigree what with that BMX XXX, but that'd make light of a real travesty.

Speaking of travesties, Iceman really isn't much better, and probably has more in common with BMX XXX than it should, and no, I'm not talking about anything as exciting as topless women riding him. Rather I'm referring to his woeful surfing/ice-skating gameplay mechanic, which is bad enough in open environments and even worse in the on-the-rails style tunnel levels. Not only is it pretty boring, but the controls absolutely suck, especially when you've got a timer counting down and you're trying to aim the ice-beam with the left stick while still steering with the right, and holding down X at the same time. Note to Z-Axis: the controller has triggers and shoulder buttons for a reason.

Onto Nightcrawler then, and it's only here that some genuine fun can be had, thanks to a forgiving implementation of the blue bible-basher's teleportation ability. Squeezing the right trigger allows you to teleport fairly intelligently; based on whatever object you're on-screen cursor is nearest to, though you can affect the direction with a thumbstick. Even if you end up in the wrong spot, pulling the trigger again moves you quickly, and while it's a little jarring camera-wise, it certainly enhances the manic manouvres we've come to know and love from Nightcrawler. Pulling the left trigger and pressing B will lock onto an enemy and allow you to pop-up behind them and start wailing on them, before you zip off again. It's quite cool and though it gets old, and his levels are just as pedestrian as the rest, it's certainly the highlight of the game.

X-Men 3: The Official Game isn't particularly long or difficult on the average difficulty, and should take most players maybe 5-7 hours to beat tops. In yet another mind-boggling decision, the game has no unlockable contents that relate to the movie; no trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews or anything interesting. All you can do is unlock two alternative costumes per X-Man - a street outfit and one based on their comic costumes. It gets worse though; to get them, you'll have to collect every single collectible for the character in the game. In case you're a bit slow, this means you won't get the new costumes until you've already finished the game.

And you'll have to be a special kind of masochist to want to replay this game for any other reason besides the Gamerscore points and Achievements. Which, incidentally, pretty much all require you to finish the game 100% to get any decent amount of points. 3 Achievements are worth zero, 3 are worth a total of 70 points, and the remaining 930 are locked into the last 10 achievements, which require you to collect all the unlockables and finish the game on hard with all 3 characters. So if you're after easy points, this probably isn't worth the agony of slogging through the tedium that makes up the game.

The visuals are perhaps the greatest disappointment of all, at least on Xbox 360. There is absolutely nothing 'next-gen' or 'high-def' about this mediocre medley of bland textures and low-res models. The main mutants bear a decent resemblance to their on-screen counterparts, but it's hardly a mind-blowing feature. About the only positive is that there's no real slowdown or graphical issues, unless you consider having a shithouse camera a graphical issue.

The sound fares a little better, if only because the film's actors voice their characters. Even Alan Cumming and Tyler Mane were coaxed out of retirement to lend credibility to Nightstalker and Sabretooth. It certainly feels like a waste of their talent given how poor the game is, but the dialogue at least is alright, as well it should be with the co-author of X-Men 3: The Last Stand's script on-board. The music is utterly forgettable aside from the theme, and the sound-effects are so generic that if you listen hard you'll recognise the exact same water-drip from the original Quake and countless low-budget titles since the 1990's.