Marvel Super Heroes

 RANKINGS 

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1. The Amazing Spider-Man: City in Darkness - Score = 7.2    Tier = Good

Attempts to beat: 1

Excelsior! Time for some super hero action! I have been looking forward to playing this series for awhile, particularly since I finally managed to get my mitts on the final book in the range at a non-ridiculous price. The game system here is basically the same as that from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gamebook series, which makes sense as they are both from the same publisher (TSR). You are provided with a stats card for the character you are playing at the front of the book, which assigns values for your various attributes. These attributes and their values differ from book to book depending upon what super hero you are playing as. I like this approach as it allows the authors more leeway to tailor each adventure as they see fit. In this first adventure, we get to play as Spider-Man, and are assigned his stats in the areas of Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, Psyche, Webbing, and Health. These attributes are then tested at various places as you progress through the adventure by rolling one die and adding your attribute value to the result, then comparing that total to the given number to see if you pass or fail. This is then a "dice check" book as opposed to a "combat" book. There are probably 2-3 more stats than are really needed here, and as a result there are a few that are only ever tested once or twice (and maybe not at all depending on which way you go). What I don't like is that the player has no opportunity to distribute points to the stats themselves, thus taking away most of the strategy that could be found in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragon series. In addition to the above stats, you also have Karma points, which you can gain throughout the adventure by performing heroic actions, and which you can then spend to help you with some of the dice checks. There is a pretty big goof to start with here though, as the stats card shows that you begin with 6 Karma points but the rules say you begin with 12. I'm not really sure which is supposed to be correct, so I went with the lower value of 6. 

Starting off the series using Spider-Man as the player hero is the blatantly obvious choice. He is likely the third most well known super hero in the world after Superman and Batman, and as they are both DC properties, Spider-Man therefore is the top bill among Marvel characters. The story here plays out in a mystery style, with two different events occurring: the super villain Electro having escaped custody, and the theft of tons of industrial electrical equipment from a government warehouse. Spider-Man believes there is a connection between these events (duh), and sets out to put the pieces of the puzzle together, all the while being threatened by an unknown villain who vows to bring Manhattan to its knees unless Spider-Man surrenders to him. Much of the story surprisingly plays out on the low key side, with hints scattered throughout the story that we might eventually get to take on the Sinister Six (Electro, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, Vulture, Sandman, and Kraven the Hunter). This turns out to be a huge tease however, which is a shame. This adventure sure isn't shy about name dropping other characters from the Marvel universe, but a gamebook built around taking down all of those above mentioned villains one at a time could have been fantastic. And what would a Spider-Man story be without the cantankerous J.Jonah Jameson around for him to torment? Surprisingly though, I never came across Aunt May anywhere in the book (although she could still be in there someplace). 

The adventure plays out pretty linear for the most part, as you move from story event to story event. From taking on high powered thugs in the street, to attending a job interview at the Daily Bugle newspaper, to investigating the warehouse where the thefts occurred, it all flows together smoothly.  You make your way through these episodes, trying to navigate each without losing Health points and hopefully gaining Karma points, until you deduce the location of the villain's lair and make your assault on him. There are a couple of exceptions where you are given 6-7 options on what lead you would like to pursue in trying to solve the mystery that the book presents, and I felt these provided for some really great exploration. Although the book does run the risk (as many others do I might add) of having you miss a lot of good stuff if you actually play cleverly, as you can then shoot to the endgame before experiencing many of the other fun story angles and side quests. There are also some strange "interlude" sections in the book, where we are told what is going on from the villain's perspective. I always find these kind of things out of place in gamebooks, because we are supposed to be playing as a individual character, so how would we have knowledge of these events if we were not physically present? I'm more inclined to let it slide though if these sections are interesting and well written, and fortunately that was the case in this book. 

If anything holds this adventure back it would be the difficulty level, which is very low. This book only took me one attempt to defeat, and I don't feel like that was just me being lucky either. Not once did I ever use any of my Karma points, so they don't seem like a needed inclusion in the slightest. Failing the dice checks seems to cause a loss of Health points as opposed to instant failure which is a good thing, but you are provided a pretty hefty amount of Health points to begin with, so there really isn't a lot of tension with these dice checks either.  Therefore, just by not selecting any obviously incorrect options (such as deciding to just quit being Spider-Man as you are offered to at one point) should see you making it through the adventure no problem, barring some incredibly unlucky dice rolls I suppose. 

Special mention needs to be made of the final confrontation with the main villain of the book. How you get the optimal ending (and there are a few "successful" endings that can be found) requires you doing something quite counter-intuitive. I have to admit, this ending caught me by surprise in a good way and showed some bravery on the part of the author in going this route. That said, I could see how some readers might find this ending to be a bit preachy, especially when you are playing as a super hero known for his quips and punching people out. Author Jeff Grubb hammers home a moral message right at the very end, and I do think he may have gone a bit over the top with it. Speaking of those quips, Grubb doesn't hesitate in having Spider-Man rattle off more than his fair share of one-liners, with some being quite clever, and some quite eye-rolling. I found his writing overall here though to be excellent. He does a wonderful job in capturing the feel of a comic book and I found his prose highly entertaining. The first half of the adventure doesn't have as much super-hero action as you might expect (or want) from a Spider-Man story, but I enjoyed it thanks to his immersive writing. It came as no surprise to me to find out he is also an actual novelist, with many fantasy novels to his credit. 

I mean cmon....unleash those babies!

Ranking: This was good fun and a great read. The lack of any real strategy in playing the adventure hurts it, and is something I hope is addressed in future books. I can't go much higher on the score than this because of how easy the adventure was, but this is definitely a nice start for the series. 

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2. Captain America: Rocket's Red Glare - Score = 5.1    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 1 

Ugh. Well that was a huge disappointment. This series was off to a solid start after the first book, but completely fails to build on that with this entry. This adventure sees us playing as Captain America, World War 2 veteran and now leader of the superhero team known as The Avengers. The rest of The Avengers sit this one out though, and the story here finds "Cap" on the trail of a villainess called The Viper, who has stolen a shipment of US government missiles (or "rockets" as the book likes to refer to them), and is in the process of selling them to various groups and individuals throughout the United States, with the goal being that the more people that use these rockets to fire against their enemies, the more chaos it will cause, with her eventual goal being the overthrow of the government. 

I was surprised to see that the stats used in this book were almost identical to those used in the previous adventure, with the only difference being that instead of a Webbing attribute, you have one for your Shield instead, which reflects Captain America's skill in throwing it (although he almost never uses it so I'm not sure what the point is). Once again you are not able to allocate any points among your attributes, which on the one hand makes sense as these characters are who they are, but still, it robs the game of an element of strategy that it otherwise could have. I believe many of the stats here are used even less than in the previous book, as I think I had 3 or so that weren't tested at all. The adventure also doesn't have the interesting exploring option that the prior book had, making it seem even more linear than that quest as well. And incredibly, once again the Karma points are goofed up as this time the stats card shows you beginning with 8 points of Karma, while the rules still state you begin with 12 points. Shouldn't someone have caught this mistake after the first book?  

There appeared to be far less to do in this adventure, despite it containing a few more sections than the first book. As Captain America, you stake out a warehouse as your first task, then you move on to the villain's lair almost immediately after. The book does in fact open up with a sequence at your headquarters where you can participate in a game, whereby you and your provided teammate (Captain Marvel) compete against two other superheroes (The Wasp and Sub-Mariner) to see who can be first to run through a computer generated gauntlet of traps and robots. This is an intriguing idea, but isn't capitalized on very well, and the whole contest plays out in an uninteresting manner, with the second half of it almost glossed over entirely. This whole game can also be skipped completely, and even if you participate in it, you aren't really accomplishing anything as it relates to the main goal of the adventure. With or without this, by the time I had beaten the book I didn't feel like I had actually DONE all that much. 

Instead of giving you the opportunity to call in some of your Avengers teammates (how cool would it have been to get to fight alongside the Hulk or Thor?), here you can find yourself accompanied by two run-of-the-mill SHIELD agents called Hoffman and Bronder. I can't seem to find any reference to them in the Marvel universe, so I have to conclude that they were created just for this book. In a comic universe so flush with interesting characters, why would author Kate Novak do this? More to this point, what was the author thinking when she selected the villains for this adventure? The Viper, along with her henchmen Nitro and Blacklash, serve as the bad guys we get to take down, and I'm not sure you could have picked a couple of more obscure Marvel villains if you tried. To make matters worse, Novak doesn't give any of these baddies any kind of characterization, with The Viper being a villain that hates everything and everyone and the other two coming across as nothing more than low level thugs. You might as well be fighting against three mindless robots with just different colored costumes. Her choice of characters to include all throughout this adventure is puzzling at best, and extremely disappointing at worst. 

There was also a little too much silliness going on in this book, even for a superhero adventure. Right at the beginning, you are tipped off to the plans of The Viper by a criminal informant called Constrictor, and the means by which he contacts you is ridiculous. You happen to be walking past Central Park in New York City and he calls out to you from behind a bush. Was he just waiting there the whole time on the off chance that you might stroll by? The banter between the two SHIELD agents is also oftentimes tortuous to read. And don't even get me started on the "two-man bridge" maneuver. However, I did appreciate that Captain America is so by-the-book that he needed to obtain a warrant before he staked out the villains warehouse. 

Hmmm, maybe I should take back what I said about the silliness.

There really isn't much going on here, from either a story perspective or a gameplay perspective. You travel along, making some rather mundane decisions, and are not provided any interesting avenues for exploration or experimentation. I did feel this adventure was perhaps slightly more difficult than book 1, but that may just be because I actually felt like I needed to use my Karma points for once, albeit only the once. There is a roll at the end of the adventure that is somewhat telegraphed as being key to beating the book, so I decided there wasn't much point to building these up and never using them, although I'm starting to think that the gaming experience might actually be better off without these Karma points altogether if the adventures are going to be this easy. 

  

Ranking: A big step back from book 1. It was almost just as easy as the previous adventure, but without the great writing and interesting story. While both of the first two books in the series took me one sole attempt each to complete, this adventure felt far shorter than the Spider-Man one and also lacked the fun mystery to uncover. While I wont say it's bad, it might be one of the blandest gamebooks I have ever played.

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3. Wolverine: Night of the Wolverine - Score = 5.3    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 2

SNIKT! Time for some eviseratin' bub! The third book in the series sees us playing as everyone's favorite little ball of hate.....Wolverine! If you're going to pick one of the X-Men for a solo gamebook adventure, he is the obvious choice (although I would love to see a Gambit gamebook). The story here isn't really anything to get excited about, and in fact it's the second one in a row I found to be on the boring side. Wolverine here sets off to find a friend of his, Heather Hudson aka Vindicator, located in British Columbia, Canada. I found the setting very apt considering Wolverine is Canada's best known super-hero (not that there are a ton to choose from), although they don't really use it to great effect as you won't find yourself adventuring through the Canadian Rockies or anything (despite what the book cover seems to suggest), which is too bad. Anyway, once in Canada, Wolverine finds himself abducted by terrorists and must find a way to free both himself and Heather before he is turned over to the villain who hired the terrorists, who then plans to have him killed in the process of discovering the secret behind his adamantium infused skeleton. 

I have become very conditioned to Hugh Jackman's portrayal of the Wolverine character over the past 20 odd years on the big screen, and in my view only Christopher Reeve as Superman has done a better job in a super-hero movie role (ok, now cue up the Robert Downey Jr comments!). This is even more impressive when you consider Hugh Jackman looks nothing like the Wolverine character physically, with the muscular actor standing 6'3 while the comic character checks in at 5'3. Once I got past that and remembered what Wolverine was actually like in the comic books, I appreciated how authors Jerry Epperson and James Ward brought him to life and enjoyed their representation of him. The villains are also one of the bigger strengths of the book, and a fine job is done in realizing characters such as Mystique, Blob, Pyro, and the Fenris twins. Magneto also makes an appearance, but as the leader of the X-Men and not as an adversary. This caught me off guard at first, but I believe this was in fact the state of affairs in the comics at the time this gamebook was written, and I'm sure there are some X-Men experts out there who can either confirm or refute that. 

There really aren't a lot of positives after the above however. This adventure does something similar to the Captain America book by having an opening sequence that really has no bearing on the rest of the book. Here, Wolverine participates in a Danger Room session that sees him having to battle three androids (two of them created to look like the Blues Brothers, I kid you not) in a dark alleyway. Unlike the Captain America combat game though, this sequence can't be bypassed. This only seems to exist in order to pad out the book. Oh sure, you gain some Karma points if you win the encounter, but those are plentiful enough anyway that they aren't much in the way of a reward. There really should be some kind of stat modifier gain for completing this successfully to at least give it some meaning.

The book is also incredibly inconsistent regarding Wolverine's mutant healing ability. You can go long stretches without recovering any Health points from damage you may have taken earlier, until at roughly the halfway point of the book you are told your mutant healing has kicked in and you can restore all your stats, including Health, back to max value. It's as if his healing ability isn't constant, but occurs only once per day (perhaps when the clock strikes midnight?). The adventure also contains one of those "can't avoid capture moments" that I never enjoy. No matter what you do, the terrorists ARE going to capture you, so what is the point of even fighting back? It makes more sense to just surrender and get on with it. 

Moving on to more negatives, a couple of times you are asked what section number you just came from, and this determines what happens next. This kind of thing aggravates me, as now I either have to keep a finger on the page I just came from until I'm sure it's not needed, or pray that my memory is good enough to remember where I just was. This really seems lazy, as if the authors only do this to keep from having to write a few extra sections. I also noticed at one point, that the villain Mysterio is referred to in the text, and I thought "wait, do they mean Mystique and this is a typo?". Well unfortunately whomever was commissioned to do the artwork must have only gone off that section, because one of the illustrations here actually shows the Mysterio character drawn in all his fishbowl-head glory. I mean, Mystique is a shape-changer, so maybe she was intending to be disguised as Mysterio in that sequence, even though it is mentioned absolutely nowhere that this is the case? Yeah, that's a pretty big stretch. I think it's safe to say this was a major goof. 

All the books in the series so far have been pretty linear, and this one is certainly no exception. You are basically on rails with very little room for deviation, with everything coming down to whether you will pass the string of skill checks at the end or not. However, I do think that the adventure does a better job than the previous ones of making you use your Karma points. They still aren't needed throughout the first half of the story, but once you hit the final stretch there are several rolls to make where failure spells doom, and the target numbers you are given to make are actually quite high (some of them you need to roll a 10 or higher). The adventure then mostly fails to capitalize on this though by providing more than enough Karma points to see you through. A couple times I found myself using Karma points to pass a skill check, then when successful, found myself awarded even more Karma points for that success. This often led to me leaving the encounter gaining more Karma points than I had just used. Still, I at least had to put some thought into using these points this time, however briefly.

Ranking: After a good start, the series appears to be going off the track a wee bit. I give this book a slight edge over book 2 as I enjoyed the characterization more here, and this adventure also required slightly more consideration to be put into where to use Karma points (and the series does appear to be getting incrementally better regarding this). However, it's still far too easy overall and has several design issues and sloppiness that bring it down considerably. 

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4. Doctor Strange: Through Six Dimensions - Score = 7.5    Tier = Good

Attempts to find optimal ending: 7

And now for something a little different. The fourth adventure in the Marvel series sees us getting to play as Doctor Strange, the most powerful sorcerer in our dimension. The story definitely plays out in a strange way too, which is obviously very befitting of the character. As Strange, we find ourselves relaxing in our headquarters (the Sanctum Sanctorum) in New York City one day, when we are visited by beings from another dimension who warn us of an inter-dimensional war that has been raging for years and now threatens to spill over to our Earth dimension. In order to prevent the many lost human lives that would result from collateral damage should this happen, we take it upon ourselves to find a way to either stop this war altogether, or to make it impossible for these warring factions to remain here. The adventure does a good job of providing you with an ultimate goal, but then giving you absolutely no clue as to how you are going to accomplish it. You just head out the door to investigate some disturbances in New York and go from there, and this works really well.   

To say this book switches it up from the linearity seen in the first three adventures would be an understatement. You begin in New York City with 3 different locations you can investigate in any order you choose. From there, you have a free movement system whereby you can proceed to travel to the other 4 dimensions pretty much at will (with Time being the only dimension that is hidden and needs you doing something very specific in order to locate it). You can also visit dimensions you have already been to multiple times if you so choose, providing you don't lock yourself out of any of them by having something disastrous happen while you are there. This provides for a boatload of exploration and experimentation, and after I was finished I felt like I had read every single section in the book. Aside from some continuity issues that may arise from all this, this is a real strength of the adventure and I enjoyed searching high and low for various items and pieces of information. Some of these items and information can aid you in finding certain endings, or they can otherwise act as total red herrings and prove completely useless. More to this last point, the adventure contains several successful endings, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. On the plus side, it greatly enhances replayability and encourages you in trying many different things, but on the negative side it can make some of the individual victory paths through the book extremely short. To make me feel like I got my money's worth out of the adventure, I took it upon myself to find my way to what I believe is the "optimal" ending contained in the very last section of the book. As such, I ended up succeeding in defending Earth by reaching sub-optimal endings several times over until I managed to reach this last-section ending and finally felt like I had "won". 

As good fun as it all was, there are some things that brought the score down a bit. First, and most glaringly, where the heck is the magic system? You are actually playing as the Sorcerer Supreme of the Marvel universe and there is no spell system to be found here. Yes, Doctor Strange does use magic all throughout the book, and rare is the section that goes by where he doesn't, but almost none of that is left up to the player. The closest you get is at one point being provided a list of 4 spells and are asked to choose which one you want to use. This doesn't make it any different from choosing among different items to use, or indeed any list of actions to take in any other similar section. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series, also published by TSR, had some adventures with a well done magic system that added a level of strategy by giving you a list of one-use spells that you crossed off as you cast them, so it's a huge shame there isn't something similar implemented here as the set up is perfect for it. Oof, a big miss!   

Also, the free movement system paradoxically serves as both a positive and a negative. The positives of replayability and exploration I mentioned earlier, but from a negative standpoint you can easily find yourself going round and round in circles, visiting the exact same location and reading the exact same entry half a dozen times on one playthrough. This additionally brings with it the usual continuity problems most free movement systems come with. At one point I witnessed the death of a sorcerer from a different dimension, only to find that as soon as I left it was as if this death never occurred, and I actually found myself back at this very same death sequence later in the same playthrough. 

Once more the Karma system has improved from the previous adventures, but it still doesn't get it quite right. This adventure requires you to pass several tough skill checks should you wish to find the optimal ending, and that is how it should be. The sweet spot would involve you having to seek out people to aid all over the book in order to build up these points for the final necessary checks, but once again you don't need to do this because you start out with more Karma points then you will likely need, barring completely horrible rolls on your part throughout the book (although there is one section that can see you lose all your Karma points, which was a great twist). Author Allen Varney also seems to have almost completely forgotten that the Health points in this adventure exist, as there are extremely few sections where you either lose or gain these. After receiving a vicious head butt from an alien at one point in the adventure, and not having to lose any Health points even though it almost knocked Strange out, I began to wonder if there was ANY way to lose health. I did eventually come across such instances where it does indeed happen, but they are so rare that even if you suffered every Health point loss the book contains I do not think you would be anywhere close to losing all your points, which renders this stat meaningless.   

The writing by Varney in this book is excellent, and I found his representation of Doctor Strange to be wonderful. The adventure does have a bit of a villain problem in that the main antagonist here is not very interesting in the slightest (no Dormammu here unfortunately) and comes across much as any evil sorcerer you might find in any number of Fighting Fantasy books. I don't even believe he is an actual Marvel villain but that he was created just for this book. The henchmen you need to dispatch are also about as bland as you can get, so no help there either. Still, the adventure isn't about defeating the villains so much as it is about manipulating the different dimensions in order to obtain a successful outcome for Earth, so this lack of any engrossing enemies to fight can be forgiven to some degree.

"Oh yeah. You're much more of a Thanos."

(Just an excuse to use my favorite line from the Marvel movies, delivered by Doctor Strange of course. And no, Thanos is not in the gamebook either.)

   

A special mention needs to be made of the difficulty level of the book, which depending on your reasons for playing, can vary wildly. If you are just attempting to "win", and successfully protect the Earth dimension (which is all you are tasked to do, as other dimensions are not your responsibility), then you should have no problem doing so. However, if your goal is to find the optimal ending (and again, I'm assuming the ending contained in the very last section of the book is in fact the optimal one because boy, you won't find an ending to a gamebook much more grandiose than this one), then the adventure becomes a fair bit trickier. Yes, you could still stumble upon this optimal ending on your first or second playthrough, which would be massively unfortunate because the route through to this ending is actually incredibly short, and can see you missing almost all the most interesting sequences in the book. As such, I wish the item needed to find this optimal ending had been slightly more well hidden than it was, or even better, required you to find a combination of items and information hidden within all the other dimensions in order to reach it. 

Ranking: This adventure caught me by surprise in how it much it grew on me more and more with each attempt. Therefore, a lot of how you see the book may come down to how many times you play it. Just playing it once or twice, you will likely win easily and not think too much of it. Only in through trying all the different ways to complete the book is where its design starts to shine through. It flies in the face of how I normally like to "win" my gamebooks (by having one clear victory section that I need to get to), but it was a lot of fun to explore all the dimensions of the adventure as the most powerful sorcerer in the Marvel universe. Best entry in the series so far for me.

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5. The Thing: One Thing After Another - Score = 8.1    Tier = Good

Attempts to find optimal ending: 5

It's clobberin time! Well, not really, as this adventure is more about using your head than it is about punching out bad guys, which may seem like an odd choice for a gamebook where you play as The Thing, but it's done so well that this is easy to overlook. Picking one member of The Fantastic Four to play as, I would have thought The Human Torch or Mr Fantastic would have been the more obvious choices, but I ended up being proven wrong because getting to play as "the ever-lovin blue-eyed Thing" was a blast. The story here sees a nemesis of The Fantastic Four called The Red Ghost infecting the group with a disease that causes their cosmic-ray charged cells to overload, thus eventually killing them all. The Thing, for obvious physical reasons, proves to be the member who can hold off the disease the longest, therefore it is up to him to get out there and find a cure (with some guidance provided initially by a weakened Mr Fantastic). This is a unique opening and does a sufficiently good job of propelling The Thing on his solo mission. 

Once again we find ourselves travelling between different dimensions, and I have to admit I find this plot device to come a little too hot on the heels of the previous adventure, which did something similar. Still, it's done in a slightly different way here, as The Thing finds himself travelling between more what I would call different timelines as opposed to dimensions, though I may be splitting hairs a bit. Each of these timelines shows us what may have happened had events in our universe unfolded differently. We may find that The Thing is in fact a mindless monster, or that he is a gangster, or that The Fantastic Four didn't survive their trip into space that gave them their powers, or even that their arch-nemesis Dr Doom is a hero. It's very interesting to go to these new timelines not knowing what to expect, even if one of them blatantly rips off King Kong but hey, at least it was acknowledged and done with a wink, so all is good there. 

As with the previous book, there are more than a few successful endings to be found here, with one "optimal" ending that I am once again assuming is the one contained in the last numbered section of the adventure. And I was pleasantly surprised to see a suggestion I had for the Doctor Strange book (that you should need to have to find something from all the dimensions in order to obtain the optimal ending) actually implemented here! In order to achieve the optimal ending in this adventure, you need to acquire all the possible pints of uncontaminated blood that you can get from your various alter egos, and you will therefore need one pint from each timeline. This works well because even if I missed out on getting the blood in one of the timelines, I could still use that playthrough to try and figure out what I needed to do in the other timelines in order to get it in those. So even though I knew I couldn't "win" at that particular attempt, it was far from a waste as I could still do some reconnaissance on what I would need to do in subsequent attempts. A lot of replayability is on offer here as well as there are some sub-quests that can be done, such as defeating the villain Annihilus or helping the Inhumans obtain an item they have lost. Many of the non-optimal endings can also be very bittersweet and it is actually worthwhile seeking them out as well.  

The story doesn't lack for individuals from the Marvel universe either, as Doctor Doom, Kingpin, The Watcher, Annihilus, and the Inhumans are some of the various characters that make appearances. I would have liked to have seen more interaction with the other members of The Fantastic Four however and feel like this is a missed opportunity. You do have an encounter with The Human Torch in the opening sequence of the book that turns out to be totally pointless no matter how you choose to play it out, and these kind of sequences that kick off the books seem to be a bit of a running theme with this series. 

One area of the range that has shown small improvements up to now is the Karma point system. In the previous adventures, you have been provided far too many of these, and they make passing the Karma checks much too easy (although they have been getting slightly better each time out). In this book though, I think the small improvements have turned into a big improvement and it finally nails the design, at least if you are attempting to reach the optimal ending. The Thing has a couple of stats that have quite low values and there are a few stat checks that you will need to pass should you wish to obtain all the blood. Combine this with there being very few places to pick up additional Karma and I found myself having to plot out which stat checks were essential, and save my Karma points for those, which is how it should have been all along. 

As good as I found the Karma point system to be implemented here, the Health point system is another matter. Much as in the previous adventure, you begin with a high initial amount and there are very few places where you actually lose any Health, and even in those spots the Health losses do not occur in any significant amount. So once again, even if you were to suffer every Health penalty in the whole adventure, I don't think you would come close to losing them all, which calls into question this statistic's existence. Also, from a continuity standpoint, there do appear to be some moments that repeat themselves, and some of them quite glaringly. For example, you can find yourself at several times having it explained to you that in order to cure the disease afflicting your teammates, you need to retrieve blood from your alter egos in different dimensions as if this was some kind of "eureka!" moment, even though you already know all this from very early in the book. That aside, I found the writing here to be generally very good and author Warren Spector's portrayal of The Thing to be spot on. The fact that this is apparently the only gamebook Spector has ever written came as a big surprise to me, as I believe his combination of writing and game design show he has a strong knack for it. It's a pity he didnt go on to write more adventures. 

Ranking: Extremely good! This very creative adventure combines just the right amounts of puzzle solving, tough choices, experimentation, and strong writing, and I had a great time plotting out how to make it to the optimal ending. This book easily surpasses the previous adventure as the new top dog in the series. I had some concerns after book 3 that the series was going off the rails a bit, but the last two adventures have firmly put the range back on track and I can't wait to begin the next one. Nice job! 

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6. The Uncanny X-Men: An X-Cellent Death - Score = 6.3    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 2

BAMF! Yes! I get to play as Nightcrawler! Getting to be one of the cooler X-Men in and of itself gets this adventure off on the right foot, and in addition to that, I right away found the narrative structure of this book was fantastically creative. Instead of giving you just one X-Man to play as throughout the whole adventure, your perspective is constantly shifting as you are rotated among the four provided heroes (Storm, Rogue, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler) as you attempt to make it to the end of the game. You might be playing as Wolverine for several sections (and hearing his thoughts), before shifting characters and playing as Storm for the next several, and so on. If you were playing as just one character, I don't think it would have much, if any, impact on the game design and how you need to find your way through the adventure as opposed to what we are given. Narratively however, it gives you the chance to put yourself in the boots of all four heroes at one time or another. This allows for "experiencing" more characters than previous books, so in that vein I wish a different hero instead of Wolverine had been selected for inclusion, as we already have an adventure in this series where we got to play as him. I would have preferred seeing Iceman or Colossus in Wolverine's slot, but that's more of a wish than a complaint and I suppose Wolverine's popularity can't be ignored.

The story has the four X-Men investigating a fire on a nearby island, and quickly finding that the high-tech research being done on the island has gone horribly wrong, with the robotic creations being built there having turned on their makers for as yet some undetermined reason. The X-Men thus need to find a way to deactivate the robots while safeguarding the human staff holed up in a control building on the island, and also find out who or what is responsible for the devices going haywire. There is also a subplot concerning The Hand, ninja assassins who are also on the island, but I found this angle was not really explored or explained to a satisfactory degree. Overall, the story I initially found to be quite boring, but then found it growing on me the more I played. It's still not what I would call good, but it ended up being better than where I thought it was heading. Still, I thought the characterization of both the X-Men themselves and the human staff they need to rescue was very well handled, though I did find the conclusion of the adventure to be a pretty big let down (at least the ones I found, as there are many possible endings). 

The stats card for this adventure is easily the most impressive looking in the series at first glance, as it lists all four heroes and gives their unique stats shown in a grid. However, after a bit more study, these stats aren't as interesting as they first seemed. Excluding Health points, each character only has a few stats of their own, so they each will only have a small amount of types of skill checks that they can make. And while the previous adventure finally got the Karma point system right, what does this book do? It goes right back to the prior issue of providing you far more Karma points than you will likely need. In this book, instead of giving each character their own Karma, you have a Karma pool of 30 points to start with, which is shared by all the heroes. Even if you decided to use Karma points in every single skill check in the book (which is far from necessary), I'm not sure that you would run out. Therefore, once again the book is just far too easy. My only failed attempt came, when out of curiousity, I chose NOT to investigate some smoke on the horizon early in the book, and the adventure then immediately ended. Ah, it was one of those "you choose not to play" options that was disguised as an actually prudent course of action. There also doesn't appear to be an "optimal" ending as there was in the preceding books, with many of the possible successful endings here seemingly just as good as all the others. 

Yet again though we have an opening sequence that bears little reason for being included. This time we participate in a baseball game being played among various X-Men at Charles Xavier's school, and this has to be the silliest of these opening vignettes to date. The seriousness with which the X-Men take this recreational game (with Magneto serving as the umpire!) is eye-rolling, and I wonder what any readers not familiar with the sport may be thinking. As with the Wolverine adventure from book 3, this story also takes place at a very specific point within the X-Men canon, as Magneto is still currently the leader of the group, and Storm has temporarily lost all her powers. This latter state of affairs is a bit curious to include in the adventure, as we are thus given one X-Men character to play as that has absolutely no super powers (Storm's abilities here come from her "leadership"). On the plus side, there is a key moment in the middle of the adventure where you have to decide whether to send Rogue or Nightcrawler along with Wolverine to investigate what is going on outside the control building. Depending on your decision at this point, the adventure will take two very disparate paths to the conclusion (with various different endings branching off from these two paths), and this does a great job of making you feel like you are playing almost two totally different adventures depending on which decision you make. 

Although I didn't find the story itself to be anything special, I have to give full credit to author Kate Novak for her prose here, which is quite strong. She certainly doesn't shy away from a more flirtatious angle either, as Nightcrawler continuously hits on one of the female scientists trapped inside the control building. In addition, the book also seems to have a preoccupation with sexualizing the character of Rogue (I mean seriously, check out the illustration for section 119.....whoa!), and even has dialogue from a young boy wondering why she doesn't wear a skimpier costume. That said, I have long felt that the X-Men comics from the 80's and 90's was the popular series that had the most scantily clad women (and in my younger days that was one of the title's greatest benefits!), so I suppose all this isn't totally out of place for the times, it's just something that for better or worse you probably wouldn't see done today. The book also teeters dangerously close between having too much story at the expense of the gameplay. With relatively fewer sections than most gamebooks and many of them longer narratively, most of the TSR published books have this element to some degree, but it seemed more particularly noticeable here. On a personal note, the adventure did liberally use probably my most favorite sound effect in comics, that being the sound made when Nightcrawler teleports (BAMF!). Man, I love saying that. 

Finally, I'm not totally sure how much this adventure was playtested. On one of the paths, I found myself controlling Rogue as she battled a Sentinel. In what seemed like a key skill check roll to determine if she escaped its grasp or not, I therefore decided to use Karma (not that you need to save it by any means). I ended up passing the check, which turned out to be the final one of the adventure, and moved on to the winning section. Going back to see what would have happened had I failed that particular skill check, I found that......I would have won anyway. The plethora of Karma points available almost make this moot in any case, but what was the point of a skill check like that? And the final one of that path no less! There was also another skill check that required me rolling a 1 or higher in order to pass it. That was a tense die roll let me tell you!

Ranking: The way the story is told is enough to recommend giving this one a look, even if the game design is only so-so and the adventure is once again just way too easy. The two distinct paths through the back half of the book, along with several ways to win, provide good replayability, which has been a common theme throughout the range. Overall, I put this book right in the middle of the pack for the series.

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7. The Amazing Spider-Man: As the World Burns - Score = 7.0    Tier = Good

Attempts to beat: 3

The previous adventure had us reusing playable characters in the series already, with Wolverine being put to use again, and this book continues that trend by giving us another Doctor Strange adventure. Errr, I mean Spider-Man adventure. And that's kind of the thing, this story is as much Doctor Strange's as it is Spider-Man's. We get to play as Peter Parker sure, but the story begins by having us investigating a fire (the second book in a row to open with a fire investigation) only to discover that the fire began because of a battle between Doctor Strange and his nemesis, Baron Mordo. Strange actually lost the battle, and now requires our help to track down three pieces of an artifact known as the Caputo amulet. When these three pieces are joined with the fourth and final piece, which Mordo now has, the amulet will have the power to destroy the world (of course it will!). Strange informs us that the three pieces we need to find are hidden in various cities throughout the world, these being Rome, London, and Morrocco.  I wasn't aware that Morrocco was a city, but anyway, Strange magically teleports Spider-Man to each city, and there guarding each piece of the amulet will be one of his greatest fears. With the villain here being a Doctor Strange enemy, and with much of the background given throughout the adventure relating to the master magician, this really feels like it may have worked better as another Doctor Strange adventure as opposed to Spider-Man. The only reason I can think of that the wall-crawler was chosen is because author Peter David is apparently a well known Spider-Man comic book writer, so maybe he wanted to stick with the character he knew best. If that's the case though, maybe an adventure better tailored to the web-head would have been more appropriate. Also, having Spider-Man track down three magical items necessary to defeat the evil wizard is your basic Fighting Fantasy plot writ large.  

After visiting the three cities and gathering up the amulet pieces, you are soon whisked away to a strange sequence that takes place high in the Himalayan mountains. This whole episode only seems to exist to give Spider-Man the opportunity to battle an Abominable Snowman because hey, as I've stated several times before, you can't find yourself in an icy setting in a gamebook without encountering a Yeti-type creature. This whole part of the book though seems very out of place, because of course when you think Spider-Man you think about adventures atop a snow covered mountain where his powers are almost useless right? Yeah, me neither. Thankfully this sequence doesn't last too long, and from here you are teleported back to New York for the final confrontation with Baron Mordo, who finally spills the over-convoluted shell-game of his evil scheme.

As disappointing as the story is, the design I thought was pretty good. You get to choose the order in which you travel to the cities and obtain the amulet pieces, and this allows you to figure out which skill rolls are essential in each city without having to go through the other cities over and over again, and I always appreciate that kind of setup. And once again we have an adventure that gets the Karma point system right, as you need to be careful about where you employ these points because there are many do-or-die skill checks that you will need to plan and conserve Karma for. That said, as long as you are passing the skill checks, it seems impossible to miss any of the amulet pieces because the individual cities themselves do feel quite linear. The characters guarding the amulet pieces, who are supposed to represent Spider-Man's greatest fears, include Hobgoblin, The Hulk, and.....Cloak and Dagger? The first two of those I can see, but that last one is a bit of a puzzler and I wonder what induced David to make that choice. The battles themselves though I found to be well written and tense, even if they are over perhaps too quickly. It's also a bit of a downer to know that you aren't really fighting these actual characters, only magical representations of them, which is something of a cop out. 

From what I can tell there is also only one successful ending to be had in this book, which makes it unlike the others in the series that normally provide several ways to win. I actually prefer this style as it usually contributes to the adventure being longer and more difficult. And although this admittedly does cut down on replayability, I personally enjoy this "ultimate winning section" approach more. The opening vignette is here again and is probably the shortest one so far, although it was also one of the better written ones as you have to decide whether you want to resist Mary Jane's advances or...."seal the deal" so to speak. It's obvious what you are supposed to do, but I wonder how many players will cave to Mary Jane just out of curiosity about what will happen and how far the author is willing to go on the "jump into bed with an incredibly hot Mary Jane" front. (Spider-Spoiler Alert: Not far). 

After reading the book, I wasn't surprised in the slightest to learn that Peter David was an actual Spider-Man comic book writer, as his portrayal of the character here is excellent, even if this is basically a fish-out-of-water story. Some of the Spider-Man quips throughout the book had me chuckling to myself, and this actually made me want to check out some of the comic issues he has written. His knowledge of the Marvel universe is also on full display with regards to his characterization of all the heroes and villains throughout the adventure, and it's too bad the series didnt run longer to give him an opportunity to write another installment. 

I often wondered what exactly his web was attached to in the classic cartoon.

 

Ranking: Great writing and decent design, along with actually needing to carefully employ your Karma points, do enough to bring this into the Good tier. Unfortunately, the story brings it down, as it's on the weak side and not very Spider-Man-ish, but overall I had a good time playing this. It's neck and neck with the first Spider-Man adventure in the series, but ultimately I have to give that book the edge as it felt more appropriate for playing as the famous wall crawler.  

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8. Daredevil: Guilt by Association - Score = 5.0    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 1

 

I've mentioned in other reviews how the final entry in a series almost always turns out to be the worst one. Well, I'm here to report that sadly this is the case yet again. This final adventure sees us playing as Daredevil, the blind superhero with the heightened senses. The story here has someone attempting to frame Daredevil for various crimes being committed around New York City, leaving it up to the beleaguered hero to find out who is doing this to him and stop them before he is captured by the authorities and has his reputation ruined. It's not a bad setup I suppose, but a story where the villain attempts to discredit the hero by making him appear a criminal to the public is hardly treading new ground, so there isnt much in the way of originality at play in this one.  

This entry is also the shortest of the series, coming in at only 181 sections. However, the book actually seems much longer than that which tells you all you need to know about its linearity. There is an incredible lack of deviation from the one nearly straight line through the adventure, therefore even though the book may be only 181 sections, you will feel like you have read every single one of them by the time you are finished (and that probably wouldn't be too far from the truth). 

After the opening section, where Daredevil's alter ego Matt Murdock is served with a subpoena (a thrilling start to any story to be sure), the adventure can be broken up into 5 "episodes":

1) The investigation of a fire. AGAIN with this??? Seriously, what kind of fetish does this series have for fire investigations? In any case, this episode is mercifully short and seems to act as more of an introduction to the Daredevil hero and his abilities more than anything else.

2) The investigation of an abandoned warehouse where illegal dumping is occurring. Another incredibly short episode, with you going along to investigate as Matt Murdock instead of Daredevil, and also accompanied by your on-again off-again love interest, Karen Page. At the conclusion of this sequence, I was almost yawning with boredom from what the adventure had provided so far. 

3) The investigation of the amusement park on Coney Island. Finally the adventure starts to pick up a bit here. Following up on a tip, you are given the option of investigating several of the attractions and rides in the park, with the correct choice probably being obvious if you know anything about gamebooks and amusement parks. (I mean, is the villain really going to sabotage either the aquarium or the bumper cars? One shudders to think of the carnage that would result if a massive bumper car pileup occurred!). This episode culminates with a battle against the villain Boomerang, which at last sees something exciting happening and is a strong finish to this sequence. Battling a comic villain in an amusement park also gave me Appointment With FEAR flashbacks which was a good thing. 

4) The infiltration of a theatre to confront Kingpin. Another much better episode, with Daredevil navigating his way to Kingpin's private box in the balcony while some kind of rock and roll show (?) is going on. The atmosphere of this whole episode is quite good, and includes a confrontation with another former love interest of yours, Black Widow, who appears and tries to bring you in, because you have been blamed for the earlier arson and sabotage events. Once overcoming her and making it to Kingpin's location, you are finally provided the whole "Basil Exposition" spiel from the mastermind of the plot to frame you, who actually manages to defeat you no matter what you do and sends you on to the final episode. This sequence contains a glaring mistake however, as at one point if you pass an Intuition skill check you then deduce that Kingpin has a mannequin in his box posing as himself to trap you. But then even after gleaning this information from the successfully passed skill check, you still proceed as if you didn't know this and have no opportunity to use this information!      

5) The freight ship and ocean liner. Jeesh. So yeah, the adventure concludes with one of the silliest sequences you will find. After the previous episode ended with the villain getting the drop on him, Daredevil awakens to find himself out in the open ocean, trapped inside the bridge of a freight ship that is on a collision course with a packed tourist ocean liner. In one final attempt to discredit the hero, the locked bridge of the ship is completely made of glass....so everyone can see inside and know it was you that was responsible! Good grief. This is one of those Rube Goldberg type schemes that seems completely ridiculous, even for a comic book. You escape the bridge of course, with some assistance from Black Widow, and manage to prevent the disaster. And here is where you can get one of either two endings, with both of them being almost exactly the same! I'm really not sure what the point of having these two separate endings was, and unless I missed one somewhere, to my knowledge these are the only two endings in the whole book, successful or otherwise. 

Ok, so that last sentence now leads me to the most glaring issue I had with the adventure. Most of the gamebooks in the series have proven to be quite easy, but this one takes ease to a whole new level. Is it even possible to fail this book? Every failed skill check just results in you not gaining some Karma or missing out on a boost to one of your other stats, or perhaps it leads to a very minor health point loss. You then just keep barreling forward regardless. But because you won't come anywhere close to losing all your Health points, this renders both the Karma and Health point stats totally meaningless. What do you need to gather or save Karma points for if it doesn't matter in the slightest whether you pass or fail any of the skill checks? Similarly, none of the confrontations matter either. For example, if you lose the fight to Black Widow when she attempts to bring you in, you would think that might be game over right? Wrong. You just get another skill check to see if you can convince her to let you go. Now if you fail this one it's surely game over right? Wrong. She just leaves you tied up, and the villain comes along to make his exposition speech and send you on to the final episode anyway, which is exactly what would have happened had you successfully made it to Kingpin's private box. So I believe you can actually fail every check and make every wrong choice and still make it successfully to the end of the adventure. Yikes. This is the only gamebook I can think of that I have played so far that seems impossible to lose. And while the story is interesting for the most part, I might as well go read a novelization, or even better, an actual Daredevil comic book.  

Author Matthew Costello's writing also seemed wildly inconsistent to me. The atmosphere and descriptions can oftentimes be quite good, but the dialogue and inner monologue can just as oftentimes be terrible. The Daredevil character himself also comes across as a bit of a petulant moron. I'm not all that familiar with the Daredevil character, having not been a big reader of his comics as a kid, but I find it hard to believe this is actually what he is supposed to be like. The story itself is interesting enough, keeping you guessing as to who is behind the attempts to frame you and why. Costello also does a nice job of incorporating Daredevil's more famous adversaries such as Kingpin and Boomerang, if perhaps they don't play nearly as big a role as they probably should have.   

There are also some inconsistencies as to Daredevil's blindness. We are told in the prologue that an accident caused him to go blind, and he uses his other heightened senses to give himself a feeling of what is around him. Fair enough, but then why does he seem to have detailed knowledge of everything he comes across including colours and people's facial expressions? He seems to be aware of things in far more detail then he otherwise should be, and I believe the author occasionally forgets that he is writing for a blind man, even if for one with amazing senses. There is also once again a skill check that makes no sense (not that any of them matter anyway), where the target number you need is actually lower than your stat that is being tested, thus making it impossible to fail. This is most likely a typo, but is somewhat indicative of the lack of care shown in several areas of this book.  

Ranking: One of those gamebooks that on the one hand I can't necessarily say is "bad", but on the other hand it's also barely a gamebook and I hesitate to even call it one. Is it still considered a game if you can't lose? A complete lack of meaning to any of your rolls or decisions along with the strange characterization of the hero put this one at the bottom of the series rankings.

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It didn't take long into the series to realize that the bookmarks providing the stats for all the heroes is really little more than flavour text. I mean seriously, what difference would it make if the authors assigned scores of "1" to all the stats, seeing as how they are also setting the numbers you need to make in order to pass the skill checks anyway. For that matter, you probably don't need initial stats at all, just tell the reader "you need to roll a 3 to pass this check" for example. And this is where I feel it was a big mistake not having some kind of stat allocation at the start of each adventure, as it actually would have given these stats some meaning from a gameplay standpoint. Another idea would be to be able to use any of the heroes in any of the books. Story inconsistencies aside, you could thus have Captain America trying to make it through one of the Spider-Man adventures for instance. This would additionally put to better use the removable bookmarks as you could pass them between the books, and this would have given an excellent additional reason to acquire all the adventures and then try to beat each book with each hero. As it stands, overall the series was quite fun, if far too easy for my usual gamebook taste, but that seems to be how it is with the TSR published books in general. Getting to put yourself in the boots of these famous characters and experience their worlds is the real draw here, and any Marvel comic book fans should probably give these a look.