Ok yeah, I read comic books when I was younger and i'm sure a lot of us did. To be entirely honest however, my tastes were more orientated towards the D.C fold with characters such as Batman, Superman and the kooky Justice League from the mid 80's attracting my attention more than Spiderman, Captain America or the Hulk. Although I did get into the Silver Surfer and the whole Galactus thing for a while, now that was a pretty good story so it's cool to see that the background behind Marvel Nemesis : Rise of the Imperfects actually stems from a mini-series from Marvel Comics themselves. Your standard evil scientist (what makes them evil I wonder?) wants to enslave mankind (ok I can see the attraction there perhaps) and to help him, creates several super powered henchmen known as the Imperfects, hence the name of the game.

Not being really known for their fighting games, EA surprised everyone, including us, when they released my favourite fighting game of 2004, Def Jam Fight for New York. With great graphics, animation, tight controls and bone crunching moves we've all been hanging for a sequel and to be honest, I was hoping that the lessons learnt with that franchise might transfer over to Rise of the Imperfects. Unfortunately this isn't the case and while the animations and many other parts of Rise of the Imperfects are very slick, the overall enjoyment factor is of a surprisingly low standard and considering the subject matter, Superheroes beating the crud out of each other, it's a real missed opportunity. After the sub par Goldeneye game you would think that EA might aim to take a little bit more care with big franchises such as this.

The writing can't be faulted as EA had Mark Millar on board and this is the guy that wrote the freaking awesome Ultimate X-Men as well as many other incredibly good mini-series. The story gives you a different perspective based on which character you choose, with The Thing and Wolverine being initially available and it works surprisingly well. The problem with it is that in each level you're forced to repeatedly take on mindless drones lacking in any serious A.I. If you had a respectable arsenal of moves at your disposal it might have raised the excitement level a notch but all that you have are a standard attack, block and jump. These can be modified by holding in the Left and Right trigger for a mobility or super attack (signature) move but being able to modify your attack through a selection of each Super Heroes special moves, like the stances in Mortal Kombat, would have made things much more enjoyable.

Combos can be strung together fairly easy but if you start one off and miss your opponent with the first attack, naturally the rest will miss and you end up very open to attack while you wait that couple of seconds it takes for the move animation to finish. The simple moves serve one purpose: the game is quick to pick up and learn but naturally the downside is that there's little depth to the fighting engine to provide that long term enjoyment that many of us got from other fighters such as Def Jam.

The levels that you battle in contain lots of destructible areas and objects to throw around and in a nice surprise, you can even catch objects thrown at you. Naturally your opponent can do this as well so picking up a car and hurling it at him isn't guaranteed to achieve the desired result as you might find coming right back at you! The levels contain plenty of objects such as crates, barrels, cars and trucks that can be picked up depending on the strength of your character and this adds a little more depth to the limited moves available to you. Some multi-tiered levels would have been welcome and playing as the Thing and being able to pull off moves such as throw opponents through buildings or from rooftops down to street level wouldn't have been original, but certainly loads of fun but sadly it isn't possible.

With artist Jae Lee behind the character art in Rise of the Imperfects there's definitely no denying that the game looks good. The characters are animated almost to perfection and move very smoothly indeed. The characters such as Spiderman look just about the best that they have ever looked in a computer game but at the same time the bump mapping on the Thing looks a bit overdone. The effect highlights the fact that he's meant to be made of stone but a bit of subtlety could have been applied, especially with the shadows in between the rocks he's made of. The other characters that you unlock such as Iron Man, Electra and the baddies that go by some fairly cool names such as Johnny Ohm, Fault Zone and the wink, all look great but a bit more work could have been done on the models. They look great good with some excellent lighting, but i'm sure that if Rise of the Imperfects was an Xbox exclusive title that they could have looked a whole lot better and featured some extra polygons to help smooth out a few of the rough edges.

The biggest problem with the characters is not how they look but rather that they are so unbalanced. During the single player game it's not a real issue as you want to be able to power through it as quickly as possible to unlock everything but in multiplayer it becomes a real problem. Like other fighting games, Rise of the Imperfects contains some characters that are faster or stronger than others but in Versus mode the differences and weaknesses of many of the characters become apparent all too quickly. The controls respond instantly like they should but with the limited number of moves at your disposal the characters all start to feel samey and it's an issue because it happens pretty quickly into the game. The characters have their own special moves, but they're all accessed the exact same way so once you have the controls memorised, you know how to use every Super Hero. The animations all vary of course, Wolverine might do whip out his claws and do a massive airborne spin for his special move, Spiderman will shoot webbing and the Thing will do a ground pound, but the controls to pull them off are all identical. Again, this reduces the amount of time needed to get into the game but robs it of any depth to keep you interested past the first few days.

If you find it hard to get your mates together for a multiplayer bash Xbox Live multiplayer is supported and to be honest, unexpected, so kudos to EA for starting to support online multiplayer on the Xbox more and more. There seems to be a few games going most of the time at the moment and even against a few overseas players didn't encounter much lag, but then against an Australian player there was lag so that was a bit odd. The big problem still exists though in that due to the lack of depth in the fighting, I don't think that Xbox Live can save the game and I'd be surprised if it develops a big following.

The Xbox Live multiplayer is always welcome but based on the feedback from other owners of the game it doesn't sound like there will be a whole lot of Xbox Live action going on. Rise of the Imperfects is worth a rent for a weekend if you're into Super Heroes, especially ones from the Marvel universe but you won't regret returning it a few days later and will most likely never return to it. If you do invite some mates over for some Versus action just don't pick the Thing as after the tenth time of hearing him say 'it's clobbering time!' you'll probably wish for Venom himself to crash through your window and kill you!