Fantastic 4

The smartest thing about this 2005 tie-in is that it refuses to let the four heroes share a control scheme. The Thing punches through walls and hurls chunks of scenery. The Human Torch fights at range, roasting enemies from the air. Mr. Fantastic stretches into grapples and whip attacks that cover half a room, and the Invisible Woman leans on force fields and telekinesis to crowd-control. Most licensed brawlers of the era gave you one fighter with a reskin. This one actually built four.

The structure around those movesets is more conventional. 7 Studios and Activision shipped it alongside the Tim Story film, and the campaign follows the broad beats of the movie before wandering off into Latveria and other comic-flavoured territory once the plot runs out. Corridors, arenas, waves of Doombots and hired goons, a boss at the end. The camera is fixed enough that you rarely lose track of the action, which matters when the Torch is lighting up half the screen.

Co-op is where it makes its case. A second player can drop in at any point and take one of the available heroes, and the game is clearly designed around that: team-up attacks pair characters for bigger moves, and several obstacles want two sets of hands. Playing alone, you swap between heroes at will, which works but flattens the whole point. The AI partner is a bystander with a health bar.

It has aged the way most mid-decade film tie-ins have. The combat is shallow once you learn that each character has a reliable crowd-clearing option and little reason to use anything else. Enemy variety thins out badly in the back half, and the upgrade system exists mostly to gate moves you already expected to have. The voice work, with several of the film cast involved, is better than the material around it deserves.

What survives is the feel of the Thing. Heavy, slow to turn, and genuinely satisfying when a swing connects and a stack of crates stops existing. A licensed brawler on a six-month schedule rarely gets one character right, and this one got at least that much. Play it on the couch with someone who knows the comics, and it does the only job it was ever asked to do.