Where the Arc Gets Tough to Read
Before this issue, the story was nice to follow because all the teams were in different places. Cyclops was over here, Cable was over there, Wolverine was doing this, Boom-Boom and Rictor were doing that. The spread out stories made the reading interesting. Sure, the last X-Men issue (UXM #272) had everyone together, but it kept things moving in the Chris Claremont style of showing other behind-the-scenes stories. Here: Louise Simonson just isn't as strong of a writer. Each team is present and the story is pretty much a straight forward narrative of their interactions with Hodge. Without much variation, and with so many characters, the story drags. The plot is still very interesting, it's just not executed well.
Besides this, where was Liefeld in this issue? He does the cover, but did he bugger out to create Deadpool for the next New Mutants issue? Some people have issues with this guy, but when he gets substituted for Guang Yap, yikes. Yap's style is bland; kind of like some guy simply filling in who knows he'll never be heard from again.
In short, the story is great but the execution is pretty bad. It's a tough issue to look at, as well as read. For an arc so far along in the story they shouldn't have dropped the ball so badly. It makes me loathe to have to read the last chapter (because Bogdanove isn't much fun to look at either).