Some games are so incredibly 'okay' that it's very difficult to think of anything to say about them. They're not bad games - they don't do anything particularly poorly - they just bimble along, neither infuriating nor invigorating, neither interesting nor annoying. Between the triple-A classics and the abominable, unplayable wrecks lie the also-rans, the workhorses, the near misses - or, as I shall endeavour to call them from now on, the Wolverines.

Loosely based upon the recent summer blockbuster, X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition is a third person action adventure with one unique selling point: extreme and unpleasant violence. If the big screen versions of everyone's favourite regenerating, admantium-clawed mutant have been a little too tame for you, then fret no more because Raven's game is waist deep in blood and viscera. And twitching corpses. And giblets. With a plethora of finishing moves, quick kills and special attacks to perform, all of which result in dismemberment, disembowelling and other words that begin with 'dis' and end with innards spraying all over the screen, if you're looking for insane gore then you've come to the right place.

Surprisingly enough you play as Wolverine, leading the angry hairball through a number of missions, some set in the past, some set in the present and all of them rigidly linear. Invisible walls and magical, indestructible boxes block your path at every turn, funnelling you towards your objectives. Alongside the slaughtering of thousands there are also boring platform sections that test your patience and the kind of puzzles that a child could happily solve whilst falling headfirst out of a tree.

The controls are simple enough, with the analogue sticks controlling movement and camera, while the face buttons are assigned to jumping, slashing, throwing and Wolverine's feral sense, a sort of GPS that points you in the right direction and reveals hidden aspects of the environment. Finally, the shoulder buttons deal with special attacks and dodging. Despite being an all but immortal being, Wolverine can take enough damage that he becomes incapacitated, allowing him to be captured by whoever is after him at the time, adding at least a little bit of peril to the proceedings. There are some RPG-lite elements as well, with Wolverine levelling up and gaining new powers and abilities as he does. It's not a complex system and it adds no real depth to the game, but it at least allows a mite of control over how your own little Wolverine develops.

The game is powered by Epic's ubiquitous Unreal engine and whilst it's usually steady and reliable, there were moments where texture pop in, stuttering animations and odd glitches all raised their ugly heads. They didn't detract too much from the experience but they are symptomatic of another unfinished movie tie-in rushed out to meet an overly ambitious deadline. The soundtrack is pretty much what you'd expect from a game of this type - orchestral sweeps with the occasional crunching guitar part when there are bosses around - while the sound effects are suitably squelchy and the voice acting, which is mostly provided by the actors from the film, is reasonably inoffensive. The grunts and growls that Wolverine makes as he slashes and butchers everything in sight become annoying after a matter of seconds though, sounding more like a second-rate Tasmanian Devil impression than anything threatening or animalistic.

Levels range from an African jungle populated by machete-wielding natives and blue teleporting mutant things to military facilities manned by a variety of soldiers and robots and soldiering robots, plus the likes of a snowy wasteland, a Casino and the sky. There are behemoths to cut down, helicopters to launch yourself at, four-armed assassins to de-arm and morbidly obese men to ride around a supermarket upon. The levels quickly become repetitive, especially the African flashback levels, which eventually become so similar as to be indiscernible from one another, while the larger boss battles are simply a case of dodging, lunging and hitting then rinsing and repeating over and over again.

Wolverine Uncaged runs out of ideas about halfway through, stringing together a bunch of boss battles with no levels between to break them up. The platforming sections levered in to create the illusion of pacing feel a little 16-bit, with switches to stand on, platforms that only stay in one place for a set amount of time and beams to cross with perfect balance. The combat is fluent enough to keep things interesting, but even that begins to drag; once you've seen Wolverine lift a man above his head and then repeatedly stab him in the gut once, you've seen it a thousand times. And you will. The environment can be utilised, with spikes, fire, forklift trucks and electrical boxes all available to use for the despatching of baddies, but even this isn't enough to keep your attention; it's not so much that the sections are boring - it's that you've already done them all before. There aren't enough set pieces, enough "wow" moments, enough differences to keep you excited and entertained.

As also-rans go, X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition is squarely in the middle of the pack. There's nothing spectacularly broken about it - and indeed in places it can be wonderful fun - but outside the gore there's nothing of any particular note, nothing that sets it apart from the massive gaggle of other third person action games that are clogging up the market. As a movie game it's much better than most, but as a videogame it's little more that unremarkable. You may well find yourself enjoying Wolverine Uncaged but unsure as to why, so unless you're a troubled youth in need of constant digital violence or a Marvel comics completionist, this is one to rent.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).