YMMV / X-Men (1993)

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: You can fight Sabertooth at the beginning of Excalibur Lighthouse. Sabertooth is a recurring villain for the X-Men, so his actual appearance in this game isn't weird. Rather the weird part is that he is the only boss in the entire game that has no dialogue or introduction. He just shows up, you fight him and then you move on without even a mention. Even his Arch-Enemy Wolverine has nothing to say to him. You can even skip the fight if you use Iceman to walk over his arena.
• Difficulty Spike: The first two stages aren't terribly difficult and allow the player to swap characters mid-stage multiple times. However, come stage 3 and the difficult really kicks in. The first phase forces you to do precise jumps or else fall off the pit, which does more damage. You are now dealing with invincible enemies that require a special item to even fight. The rematch with Juggernaut is harder now that not only you cannot trick into falling off a pit to instant-win, but he can now punch you if you get too close. The fight with Apocalypse that can be almost unwinnable if you don't know the trick to defeating him; backups that usually ignore defenses from previous bosses won't work here and require precise timing to use. The difficulty only multiplies with each level after that, with fewer hero swaps allowed, longer stages, more traps and Bottomless Pits everywhere that will now take up to half your health bar when you fall down one opposed to earlier in the game where it was just a fraction of that.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Nightcrawler can be used to bypass large chunks of the game and is ideal for speed runs. Aside from the fact that his teleport lets him go through physical walls and barriers, hence being able to skip almost entire stages such as Excalibur Lighthouse, he's also invincible while doing this and hits targets for insane damage. Additionally, standby teleports (where you don't move to teleport) do not drain a lot of mutant power and is extremely essential against projectiles and bosses; the later harder bosses can easily be defeated without getting hit like Apocalypse. Finally his crouching attack is lightning quick and has a farther reach than any other character, which lets him kill mooks without giving them a chance to counter. Furthermore his jumping attack propels him forward and down diagonally which, with some practice, allow him to platform quickly and get across the stage in a flash; the diagonal travel is also available to Wolverine, but requires mutant power and is temporary.
  • Iceman's support. Sure, he does no damage. However, that isn't why he breaks the game. First, in a game where falling off a pit will reduce your health greatly, Iceman is a backup point to skip those hazards. This is most noticeable in Levels 4 and 6 where it is required to hit multiple switching to generate moving platforms to reach the destination. Second, if he is used before reaching the boss battle, there is a bug where the boss won't show up almost to a certain point. You can skip mid-location bosses Juggernaut (first fight) and Sabretooth entirely. You can even get to Zaladane's spawn spot immediately, meaning you can defeat her without even having her charge or shoot her blasts at you.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Gambit when used during the Shi'ar Empire stage. He is the only character that cannot duck below the soldiers' shots, forcing him to jump over or use his mutant powers to prevent them from shooting.
• That One Attack:
  • Ahab's fast Harpoon shots, usually used after getting hit, can deliver a ton of damage enough to kill a mutant in 1 shot.
  • The acolytes' gun shots. If you decide to move when shot by them, you will get zapped and then die if done repeatedly. Additionally, since Asteroid M has a ton of pits that can almost wipe your full bar, being shot in a platform or near a lit and then falling off that pit is an instant death in Superhero Mode.
• That One Level: Ahab's World, the fourth stage. It represents a huge Difficulty Spike in gameplay, already coming off of a stage that already had a spike (assuming you didn't cheese it with Nightcrawler). It features a lot of bottomless pits which now do more damage and a lot of tricky platforming. It can even become Unintentionally Unwinnable if the player uses the Iceman bridge assist before a certain bottomless pit, since there is no other way across in two-player mode (if playing solo, Nightcrawler's dive-kick can also make it across).
• Unexpected Character: The game used all the usual suspects from the X-Men's Rogues Gallery, but one person that seemed a bit out of place was the C-list villain Zaladane, the boss of the Savage Lands. Zaladane was indeed a sorceress of the Savage Lands so using her for that stage made sense, but she had also been dead in the comics for at least two years at that point and wasn't super popular. Furthermore, the character used her last comic design and not the outfit she wore in the '90s cartoon which the game also clearly took a great deal of inspiration from.