Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

With all four on screen you’ll be able to freely choose which figure best suits a particular fight, leaving the other three to go about their computer-controlled bashing duties. The first thing that comes to mind on seeing the game in action is Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It’s all there - the isometric view of the battlefield, the four players, the endless tides of enemies to be button-bashed into oblivion. Actually, scratch that last point, for where Ultimate Alliance suffered from poorly implemented gesture special attacks - leaving players with no option but to button bash - FF:RoTS seems to have thoroughly got its wavy/tilty/flicky act together.

The word of the day is mimicking. Seven Studios understands that there’s no point in replacing a button press with a gesture if it in no way reflects the action on screen - that would be counterintuitive and leave you floundering like Aquaman on a giant griddle. Instead, they’ve opted for basic melée attacks mapped on the A and B buttons and signature moves employed by mimicking the hand movements required.

Playing as Ben Grimm, aka literal man-mountain Thing, you can perform a bone-crushing and floor-tile-shattering double-arm ground smash by bringing both the remote and nunchuk down together as he would his gargantuan fists. Mr. Fantastic can whip together his elasticized limbs for an extreme Tango slap simply by arcing in the remote and nunchuk from an open-armed position. Slightly more strenuous is the Human Torch’s rapid stream of fireballs, which require players to peddle their two hands back and forth as if they were shaking a fireball-shooting pair of maracas. The least inspiring of the bunch is the Invisible Woman’s remote flick down for a force field, presumably because the direction down is associated with crawling into a wimpy defensive ball. Kind of disappointing following the flaming maracas simile. Oh well.