This X-Men will simply grab you by the collar and throw you into the arena. Who it is, but who cares anyway — you've got a team of superheroes and you've got to bash enemies. Series fans were surprised in 2021 when this ROM hack surfaced on the Mega Drive, built on the foundation of the original X-Men 2 from 1993, with swaps in level design, warps, and passability.

It's straightforward beat-'em-up action without unnecessary chatter. You pick one of the available heroes, run forward, and hit everything that gets in your way. Average physics, fitting animations, sounds like someone banging on metal. The content is fine, the graphics are readable and uncluttered — exactly what made Sega crank out stuff like this in the nineties.

The mechanics are primitive, as they should be. Attack, special energy attack, jump, moments when someone grabs you from behind. It plays with appropriate resistance, nothing shocks you, but nothing really entertains you for long either. Few levels, random difficulty — sometimes you'll breeze through without a scratch, sometimes someone will flatten you completely.

What's interesting is that this game didn't come about in the nineties at all. It's a fan project from 2021 that attempts to breathe life into an old Mega Drive system that's been looking at the dirt for years. Technically it works, but there's nothing revolutionary about it. Compared to the original X-Men 2, it's mostly tweaking the small stuff — better balancing, reworked sections, difficulty changes. For hardcore Mega Drive beat-'em-up fans it makes sense. For everyone else, it's just another hack of an old game.

Playing it today in a browser is worth it if you're drawn to old straightforward brawlers with no frills and no explanations. You're not here for the story or a deeper experience, more for getting into the groove and leaving your brain at the door. It lasts a few hours, there's no hidden depth to it, and after a while you know exactly what to expect. But this was always precisely what these games were played for.