Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack is happy to hear that X-Men Destiny looks unlike many of the games already based on Marvel's mutant universe. "We've been collaborating with Marvel and Activision to do things very differently," he says.

In most X-Men games, you pick a familiar hero, like Wolverine or Gambit, and then explore the world from his or her point of view. In X-Men Destiny, however, Dyack and his team have been given free reign to separate powers from characters. Your custom-built hero can play through the RPG-driven side of the game by equipping powers as you would gear. You could combine Cyclops' eyebeams with Juggernaut's charge, or Wolvie's healing factor, all while finding a place in the campaign somewhere between the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants.

Unfortunately, while there are a lot of interesting touches in the story and powers system, X-Men Destiny's core game struggles to hold the higher ideas up. The graphics look only marginally better than those leaked screens, and even in the short demo I played the game's combat and enemies teetered on the verge of becoming notably repetitive.