The Fantastic Four were conceived by Stan Lee and the late, great Jack Kirby in 1961, who boldly and accurately described their creation as 'The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!' Over nearly half a century, Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Thing and the Human Torch have survived the worst threats imaginable, from the mad monarch Dr. Doom to cosmic world-eaters to a five-year run on the series by writer Tom DeFalco. We can now add Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer to that list, a game that manages to do more damage to the reputations of the first family of superheroes than an entire legion of evil Skrull impersonators.
ROTSS is, of course, the officially licensed video game tie-in to the critically panned summer blockbuster of the same name. While it does follow some of the movie's major plot points, it changes or omits several others. For example, while Galactus is mentioned in the game, he doesn't actually appear in it. Yes, you read that correctly. The comics character voted Most Likely to Be an Awesome End-Of-Game Boss by his graduating class doesn't even put in an appearance.
Borrowing heavily from Activision's far superior X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, ROTSS allows you to control one member of the Fantastic Four at a time with a press of the D-pad. The other three follow along behind you, led by some rather lackluster AI. Fortunately, your enemies are similarly lobotomized, which makes for battles that seem more like super-powered games of Marco Polo.
Each member of the FF has the usual strong and weak melee attacks, as well as their own unique super powers. The Invisible Girl -- wait for it -- can turn invisible and telekinetically manipulate objects. Mr. Fantastic can stretch to punch and slither around lasers. The Human Torch shoots fireballs, and the Thing, who you'll be controlling most of the time, can make himself temporarily invulnerable and pound the ground to send out a shockwave. A 'cosmic energy' bar that slowly refills over time limits the FF's use of their powers. It's a necessary but uninspired way to balance the gameplay, and a more imaginative solution that allowed for more super-powering would have improved the game immensely.
The ridiculously repetitive objectives don't win the game any points either. You'll spend most of your time heading through doors or crashing through walls into swarms of enemies that you must defeat in order to proceed. Sometimes ROTSS varies the formula by requiring you to beat up a bunch of baddies to access an elevator or activate some piece of gadgetry, which does absolutely nothing to reduce the monotony. A handful of other unlockables, including alternate costumes and FF comic book covers, are supposed to add to the replayability, but it takes a heroic effort to get through the 5- to 10-hour story even once, much less go back to it in the hopes of finding all of the hidden trinkets.
As you button-mash your way through the game, you bust open crates that contain tokens, which you can use to upgrade each FF member's attributes. It's not a bad idea in theory, but the four characters are so incredibly unbalanced that it completely ruins the upgrade mechanic. If you spend your tokens on upgrading anyone except the Thing, you might as well have not picked them up in the first place. This is particularly noticeable if you use the four-player drop-in/drop-out co-op multiplayer feature. If you're the one who keeps getting stuck playing as the Invisible Woman, you should take that as a clear sign that your friends hate you.
The graphics are distinctly last-gen, with bland, repetitive environments that feel as slapped together as every other part of this lackluster brawler. And it's not as if it's shocking that ROTSS feels as rushed as it does. Most gamers know not to expect much from a game based on a movie, but even by those standards, ROTSS is a disappointment. It's not as bad as the similar but different PS2 and Wii versions, but that's the faintest praise one could ever give a game.