Cast your minds back to some drivel, please… remember the first Fantastic 4 movie and the bit where the gang is hit by some crazy cosmic ray that didn’t make a lick of sense, and thus transformed into super-powered alterations of themselves that also didn’t make a lick of sense? Well, one rather salient fact both movie and comic neglected to highlight was that, despite Sue Storm’s invisibility and telekinesis, Ben now being all clobberin’-like and made of rock, Reed’s super-fun stretchiness and Johnny’s non-spontaneous combustion and ability to fly, the team is also almost completely indestructible. At least, according to this unquestionably shameless cash-in, Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer.

Sure, they fall down after taking too many hits in battle, but they won’t actually die. It’s never Game Over, not unless you’re playing one of several docile single-character sequences, upon which Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer becomes even lamer than before – a feat seemingly impossible when you first start playing the cursed thing. Instead, when a character you happen to be controlling – as you can sometimes switch between the four characters at will – falls in battle, the game quickly and arbitrarily switches to another, thus enabling you to control them while your fallen comrade picks themselves back up again. And as interesting as that might ultimately sound, it’s just one more problem awash in a super-powered sea of irks – and proof positive that, even in this next-gen age, developers just can’t seem to realise the potential of top superhero properties in videogame form.

Rise Of The Silver Surfer’s problems are many, not least of which is one of the most horrendous menu systems we’ve ever seen – both aesthetically and in terms of navigation. You get the opportunity every now and then to go into each character’s individual stats menu to upgrade their moves and so on. But given the horrible design and clunky layout, we quickly started avoiding all opportunities the game gave us to do that. Not that it made much impact on the game, mind you. After all, the fact you can’t ever really die coupled with the sometimes surprising – if laboriously slow – adeptness of the rest of the team in combat (seriously, there’s a boss fight a third of the way in where you can pretty much do nothing – just leaving the rest of your team to wipe the thing out), meant a lot of the time we just felt like holding back in battles.

Well, that, and because combat is generally rubbish. The Thing can smash the ground and shoulder-barge his way through enemies, Reed can elongate his arms to hit enemies from afar, Sue can pick objects up and hurl them about, while Johnny can fly and shoot fireballs at people. But, much like Spider-Man 3 before, it doesn’t matter how many moves or abilities characters have because it becomes just another case of button mashing whenever you get surrounded by enemies.

And speaking of moves, the developer does its best to utilise the power of each member, but in some of the most derivative ways possible. You see, only The Thing can knock open certain doors by clobbering them. Only Reed can elongate himself to reach high controls (though quite why Johnny cannot press them despite the ability to fly, or The Thing being able to throw stuff, or Sue with her telekinesis, is beyond us). Only Sue can make herself invisible and walk through dodgy blue laser beams, and only Johnny can chase – but very rarely catch up with – the Silver Surfer once he actually shows up.

That’s right: there are a number of chase the Surfer sequences, with or without Sixaxis support, just like that scene in the movie. The problem is that you can rarely catch up with the bloody guy – a conscious design choice from the developer and an extremely annoying one too. Worse still is that it’s very easy to fail these missions, despite the Surfer clearly being within distance. This serves to highlight perhaps the biggest fault of the game: it’s just annoying. If you aren’t pissed off by yet another identical room or corridor, you’ll be ready to kick the machine with all the button pressing that goes on. Worse still, there are several situations where you can just leave your team to fight for you and ultimately win – case in point being a boss fight with what appears to be a giant robot spider a couple of hours in.

What is most disappointing, however, is the fact that, unlike the previous film, the Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer movie isn’t rubbish. It’s genuinely entertaining and one of the summer’s best thus far. The fact that Visual Concepts couldn’t emulate even half of the fun in Tim Story’s film is the ultimate proof that, like most blockbuster cash-ins, this should be avoided.

Craig Gilmore