Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects is truly an imperfect game. You spend a great deal of time mashing your way through unbalanced and repetitive fights. Also there is to the game is a story mode which is similar to a standard beat-em-up, a basic versus mode, and decent on-line play for the PS2 and the Xbox. This would have been a much better game had it included a four person versus mode, but alas it was only two player.

Rise of the Imperfects definitely had some finer points. It had unlockables that were actually worth unlocking. Such as animated and narrated comics, character cards with character bios, and short videos that gave some back-story for the Imperfects. The unlockable comics kept me playing, just so I could get to see and hear the beginning of the Ultimate Fantastic Four and the Ultimate X-Men comics. You also get quite a few decent characters to unlock, such as Daredevel and Magneto.

The on-line play was also nicely implemented. Playing against humans cut out some of the bugs I’ll talk about later. It also had a decent stat and rank scoring system. Best of all there didn’t seem to be any lag while playing on-line, which made the entire experience much more enjoyable. Marvel Nemesis also had some incredible style. The menus were well thought out, and made you feel as if you were in for a great game.

Unfortunately, as I said, the game was imperfect. The primary story to the game was played out through a beat-em-up style game that threw hundreds of drones at you, and eventually would end up with a boss battle. You could choose from one of four characters to make your way through the story. The constant wave of drones was usually too easy, but that could change in a moment. At times the difficulty level would spike to nearly impossible, and you would have to try over and over to beat a certain area. One that comes to mind was a boss battle between Wolverine and Storm. Storm would keep her distance and fire constant projectiles at Wolverine making it near impossible to defeat her and usually dispatching him quite quickly.

You faced a small variety of drones throughout the game, most of which were revealed early on, and were quite easy to defeat. There were your standard foes that attacked with basic physical attacks, ones who shot at you, enemies who smashed the ground, and even ones who would grab you and explode. There were also flying enemies that were quite difficult to hit. The only way I found to quickly dispose of the flying foes was to jump into the air and throw them. That would usually take them out with one hit. They were pretty frustrating until I figured that little trick out. None of the enemies were really that intelligent. They would perform super attacks in the wrong direction, and even jump off cliffs. This helped make things easier at times, but also took some of the fun out of the game.