He's a lumberjack, and he's okay. Just try telling him otherwise.

Yesterday, Animathias sounded off on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and earlier in the week, I put my own thoughts down after giving the demo a spin. If you are a card-carrying member of the Sarcastic Gamer community, you’ve probably seen the comments and know already that this game is being pretty well-received.

The largest complaints I’ve heard so far are regarding the length, but Activision had a back-up plan in mind, in the form of DLC.

Find out more after the jump.

It seems almost like a sham, with companies often releasing DLC that appears to have been part of the game that wasn’t ready for the launch date. In the case of “Wolverine: On the Run,” however, the gameplay I’ve seen so far seems to differ enough from the original game to lead me to believe otherwise. Let me just preface this by saying that it’s not quite as exciting as the title makes it seem.

Set in the Canadian backwoods after Wolverine leaves Team X on moral grounds, it picks up a year later with James Logan living happily with his girlfriend, Kayla Silverfox. During this time of hiding out, Wolverine has found work as a lumberjack.

Troy Richardson, a developer on the game, said, “we wanted the game to cover some story ground that the film makers missed. There’s a large chunk of Wolverine’s life that we don’t know much about. Our marketing department has been reading up on the forums and reviews left on various game sites this week, and we knew that people wanted more content, and that the violence and realism of the main title are commonly mentioned. We decided to do something that was a little different.”

“Different” doesn’t begin to describe it. The DLC takes some of the great qualities of the original title, waters them down, and adds in elements of gameplay reminiscent of Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon.

“The point of the DLC is to avoid being noticed and to harvest trees. You’ll let Kayla drive you to the work site in the morning, where you’ll use chainsaws and axes to chop down trees one-by-one,” Troy continued. “You’ll use button-pressing sequences to get the saws through the tree and bring it down. After the tree has been felled with the saws, you’ll use the axe to chop off branches and get the logs ready for shipping. There will be time-trial mini-games to see how fast you can clear a trunk, as well as modes where you help make decisions in the company to make it profitable. During all of this, you have to avoid hitting your co-workers with your axe. If you do, limbs will come off and you’ll have to figure out how to explain to the foreman why you dismembered a fellow logger.”

So then what?

“If you hit too many co-workers, you get fired. Game over.”

That’s it? According to Troy, “at the end of the day, Kayla will pick you up and drive you home, where you’ll have to work on developing your relationship with your girlfriend. There’s a little heart icon and a bar at the bottom of the screen. The more full the bar is, the happier things are for the two of you. Let things fall apart, and you run the risk of going into a ‘berserker rage’ and accidentally killing Kayla.” Well, at least that part fits the comics.

Sounds…weird, I have to admit, the prospect of XMO:W content sounds great, but—the lumberjack years?

Isn’t there better content only breezed over by the opening trailer of the film? My wife asked me why Wolverine and Sabretooth fought in the Civil War on the side of the north, if they were Canadian. How do you explain that briefly?

Sure, the Civil War genre is an almost certain “FAIL” stamp in the game industry, but aren’t movie games as well? What about a game that lets you alternate between playing as Wolverine and Sabretooth through that war, World War I, World War II, and up to Vietnam? Just a level or two on each war. I’d totally go for that.

Instead, we’re getting stuck with James Logan the lumberjack.

What would you like to see in future DLC for XMO:W?

OMG can be reached at oldmarriedgamer@sarcasticgamer.com, and you can stalk him on Twitter.

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