YMMV / X-Men 2: Clone Wars

• Difficulty Spike: The Phalanx mothership is the final stage in the game and is accordingly the most difficult, taking longer to complete than every other stage in the game combined and ramping up the difficulty with harder-hitting enemies, multiple bosses and a confusing layout (by design) that will make the player wonder if they're just going around in circles.
• Even Better Sequel: Clone Wars is considered by many to be a vast improvement over the previous Genesis entry for its various additions and improvements to gameplay and the toning down of aggravating features such as character death being permanent and removing the limit on mutant power usage.
• Game-Breaker: Wolverine is far and away the best character due to his numerous advantages: he's one of the fastest characters in the game, has a double jump, can climb on walls and the ceiling to avoid enemies and skip large portions of some stages. His super attack can kill any normal enemy in one hit when you're at full health and requires no charge up like other powers such as Cyclops'. Finally his Healing Factor allows him to heal up to three bars of health turning every battle into a cakewalk provided you're patient. Clone Wars has no adjustable difficulty settings, but playing as Wolverine is basically the game's version of easy mode.
• Goddamned Bats: Magneto's Acolytes in the Avalon stage and Tusk's Tuskettes in the Temple stage.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Tony Jay narrated the commercial for the game and mentioned Magneto. He would later voice Magneto in X-Men Legends.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Sentinel Core Boss. The dark, gloomy atmosphere fighting inside of the Sentinel, the distorted screaming faces the sentinel's projection makes as it attacks you, and above all, that scream it makes as it continues to attack you which continues growing louder and higher. Many a gamer has admitted to it being the scariest part of the whole game.
  • After you defeat the boss, you are given limited time to get out of the factory before it blows up. The screen shaking compounded with bursts of flames every so often make for a harrowing escape.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: It is the Genesis counterpart to X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse and together they are regarded as the best X-Men games of the 16-bit era.
• That One Level: Tusk's stage. You start at the ground floor of a jungle temple. You have to ascend up ten floors of said temple while Tusk at the top throws boulders down on you at random intervals. Usually, these "random intervals" will be when you are jumping over a chasm or across platforms, and if your character gets hit, they will be knocked back down a floor (or more on the higher floors). This is also the first stage you can play as Magneto, something that most new players will eagerly do before realizing that this is one of the worst stages to play as him due to his slow speed and how his basic attacks take multiple shots to even hurt Tusk (though it's mitigated by being able to just float outside of all his attacks). It's a long and tedious slog, foreshadowing the Marathon Level stages ahead.
• That One Boss: Clone!Beast. Just like his counterpart, his attacks do twice as much damage as normal which means if you're careless with avoiding his physical attacks you will find yourself in a world of hurt very quickly. It doesn't help that he's encountered on a Marathon Level and if you die you have to do the whole thing over again no matter how many of the other bosses you've cleared up until that point. The only saving grace of his fight is that he moves slower than the other clones and his transformation attack is easy to bait and avoid.
• Unexpected Character: Very few would expect Brainchild featured as a late-game boss. Even if you narrow the list down to the villains the X-Men faced solely in the Savage Land, he's relatively obscure.