Xbox Dad:

Fantastic Four? Fantastic Game!

Published May 13, 2008

Hello, my name is Jason Buffington and my day job is in the Windows Storage Solutions team. On nights and weekends, I play as DarkJediHunter, and the real Xbox Dad was kind enough to let me share one of my favorite family games in this month's column (thanks, Duncan). My sons are nine and seven years old, my daughter is three, and along with my wife, we all game.

A Game for the Whole Family

This month, I'd like to bring your attention to a game that has been out for a few months, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I know most reviews are for newly released titles, but if you have pre-teen players and haven't checked out F4:ROTSS, you're missing out. It is one of the only family-friendly, four player, next-generation console games out right now. My family has played a lot of Fuzion Frenzy 2 and Viva Piñata®: Party Animals, and my sons and I alternate to play a lot of two-person titles like the LEGO® Star Wars series.  But to play together as a family, there are fewer options available.  And this one even teaches some great life lessons.

The Fantastic Four ready for action.

In our family, we have a surprisingly well-aligned Fantastic Four team:

• My seven-year-old is a bruiser of a gamer, always in the thick of the action—The Thing—he just runs in and pounds on stuff.
• My nine-year-old is learning the finer points of special powers and abilities within gaming and is often just outside of the center of the fray—Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards.
• I am a Human Torch … and I play him in the game, too. :-)
• And the Invisible Woman is played by either the Xbox 360® or my wife (with daughter "helping"). Get it? Our fourth player isn't always visible?

Here is where the life lessons come in.  In order to get through the game, everyone's special powers have to be used. There are some tasks that can only be done by flying (Human Torch) or stretching (Mr. Fantastic). Of course, there are lots of bad guys that just need to be clobbered by The Thing and the Invisible Woman has her moments to shine and/or be transparent, as well. Sure, you could do one-player and play through it by using the D-Pad to change between whom you control and get a good gaming experience, but the point of family games is to play together and Rise of the Silver Surfer does this really well.

Players can come and go, and easily switch between characters. Just the other evening, we were going through a level where my older son had to accomplish a task as Mr. Fantastic and the rest of us had to wait. He tried getting through a couple of times, but at one point he asked me to take over. As fun as that might have been, I told him that I hadn't been playing that character and I was sure he knew how to do the task better than I. He tried two more times—and got through the challenge. We all cheered and high-fived. He did it himself using his own special powers (character) and abilities (his gamer skills). He doesn't hit as hard as The Thing and he doesn't explode into flames, but the character suits the player and we all knew that we could not have completed the mission without him.

The Silver Surfer.

The other great lesson here is that there is no individual score—the team makes it through together. No matter who punches the most bad guys or solves the most puzzles, the group succeeds as a team. Everyone gets the same achievement points at the end of the level and the upgrade points are shared in a pool for amping up the characters. The team is what matters, and this game is a great way to emphasize that point.

The story picks up at a similar point where the movie started, the Fantastic Four already have their abilities and the team is well established. The story line stitches together approximately ten adventures, each one taking between 60-90 minutes to complete. This is great for a family gaming night.

Like most story-based adventures, it starts with a cutscene to set context for the segment and then breaks into a multi-level, family-friendly dungeon-crawler. As a way to introduce your pre-teen gamer to dungeon-crawling styled adventures with "family-friendly" violence, this game's a good place to start. (Dungeon-crawling means your team wanders through room after room, beating up bad guys, finding special items and developing a story. By "family-friendly violence," I mean bad guys zap with ray guns and good guys punch them or use their special powers, with less graphic detail than most Saturday morning cartoons, and no blood, language or other objectionable materials.)

Mr. Fantastic takes on a bad guy.

When one of your characters takes enough damage, they'll faint (not die). Kids can either wait 15-20 seconds while their character recovers, or they can switch control to one of the unmanaged characters. This is a great reason to play three-player, as everyone gets their favorite character, and you share a "spare" during heavy battles.

Speaking of battles, there are lots of bad guys here—using the standard model of lots of low-level bad guys, some mid-level types scattered around for flavor, and of course, a big baddie at the end of every level. All characters have standard jump/attack style controls normally (ABXY), the Right Trigger enables four character-specific abilities (RT+ABXY), and the Left Trigger delivers some very cool two-character special moves—again emphasizing the power of the team. Imagine the Invisible Woman creating a force bubble that the Human Torch fills with fire, and then it's released on some poor bad guy.

Combo moves are impressive, and teach the power of teamwork.

Either of those two characters can use that attack with the Left Trigger and then selecting the partner. Every combination has a special move. All of the individual powers, as well as overall attack, defense, and regenerative abilities are easily upgradable throughout the game using a pool of points earned by the team as they smash boxes or beat bad guys.

Beyond that, the gameplay is intuitive, even if the kids haven't been introduced to the Fantastic Four heroes before. Speaking of which, I don't believe the cartoon series is in production these days, so one can pick up the DVDs fairly cheap (including the older series). And soon, my wife and I will preview the F4 movies to see if the boys can watch them, too. We've seen them for our own entertainment, but we'll watch them again through the eyes of "parents" before the boys and I have a movie night.

The more ways we can expose them to the same characters and stories, the more they get out of each of them, and as an Xbox Dad, this raises the value of the game. I have definitely seen this in the case of LEGO Star Wars and the Viva Piñata TV show. In fact, we recently saw our first episode of the Blue Dragon cartoon series, and my older son is helping me review the game Blue Dragon™ for a future Xbox Dad column, that is, if Duncan & Trixie let us!

Ouch, that's gonna hurt.

We're planning on playing Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer again. For a game to be a good family game, it has to have high replay value. And all of the lessons that this game has taught so far should be magnified since we are all planning on playing through with a different character. My Mr. Fantastic son wants to be a bruiser as The Thing, while my other son wants to play with fire, and be the Human Torch. We'll raise the difficulty a notch, but since everybody has ideas of how they might play another role, this is one more family gaming lesson. And getting the extra achievement points and side objectives are an extra benefit.

This game is accessible for pre-teen gamers looking for the next step in their gaming development, but who aren't quite ready for more advanced crawler-style gaming such as Dungeons and Dragons®: Heroes™. Admittedly, teenage/adult players may find Marvel™: Ultimate Alliance better in graphics and gameplay, and you get the complete Marvel character set, including the Fantastic Four, but that title is more the style of fellow columnist Hardcore.

As an Xbox Dad, my kids and I are learning four-player co-op, the value of teamwork and why beating up scores of alien bad guys is so darn satisfying. So, check out Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. And when you've totally finished this one and want more, go find a copy of Fantastic 4™ for the original Xbox, recently made playable for Xbox 360.

Article by Jason Buffington (DarkJediHunter)