A Marvel Comics fanboys dream.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance continues in the well established tradition of the X-Men Legends style of superhero action RPG gameplay. Much to my delight the team at Activision, who have an extensive catalog of Marvel licensed games ranging from fun to mediocre, and Raven have decided to move beyond the X-Men franchise. This game includes a huge talent pool to draw on pulled straight from the pages of Marvel comics. A fight across the Marvel universe in an attempt to stop the Masters of Evil from destroying reality provides an epic, nicely paced, quest that allows you to progress quickly enough to keep you involved while still giving you the chance to dig around and find the variety of power ups and other extras scattered throughout each level. That’s the overview so now let's get down to the nuts and bolts, starting with the good stuff. The first thing you’ll notice when you start playing is the ease with which your original team can proceed through the opening stage. Nothing is incredibly difficult at the beginning which allows veterans of the X-Men Legends style gameplay to cruise through and get into the heart of the storyline quickly while allowing new players to quickly pick up what it is they are supposed to be doing. While it takes a little longer to work out the finer points of talent point distribution or team combat nobody is getting shoved off the deep end here. The next great thing about this game comes to light when you reach the first S.H.I.E.L.D. Access Point. The game immediately gives you access to a wide range of characters including a number of The Avengers, all of the Fantastic Four, some old X-Men favourites and a number of other characters including favourites like Spidey as well as less well known characters like Luke Cage and Deadpool. This allows almost anyone from the hardcore comics fan to the casual fan of superhero films to find a favourite character or two to go with only 15 minutes or so into the game. A number of other characters are also unlockable as you progress through the game, mainly darker characters if you will, that can fill up some of the void that may be experienced by the early absence of Marvel’s more peripheral characters. The character selection offers such variety that the game is automatically replayable if only for the sake of exploring what all the characters have to offer and to fully enjoy the ones unlocked during the first play through. While the starting characters tend to be as up to date as possible Ultimate Alliance also caters to the ageing comic geeks of the world by offering a fairly extensive set of alternate costumes which include great classic looks as well as some pretty obscure variants.
As far as the game’s difficulty level is concerned it tends to be pretty much on point and this game is not overly challenging or simple. It helps to pace the game nicely letting you progress neither too quickly or too slowly. The rank and file enemies that you will face in droves throughout the game are generally proportionate to the levels your characters should have achieved thus avoiding bogging you down with overwhelming odds as you progress through the game. The boss battles, which occur fairly frequently, break up into two categories of major and minor bosses. The minor bosses tend to be exactly that. They are made up of Marvel supervillains who are the minor rivals of individual characters and those battles usually involve simply slugging it out with the likes of Bullseye, the Rhino, or Ultron. While these bosses usually have a couple of decent powers they don’t pose an overwhelming threat and they mix in nicely with the story’s progress. The major boss battles tend to be level enders and almost always involve an initial impression of unbeatability but you should be able to figure out a key to exposing a weakness in each of these major bosses.
Lastly the My Team feature which appears after the first couple of missions allows you to consolidate your favourite heroes into a customized team of your own making. This feature not only helps to augment your team by gaining reputation points that can be used to increase certain attributes for the entire team but it also helps to personalize the game experience and bring together characters with seemingly no connection.
So this all sounds dreamy right? Well let’s get down to a few of the quirks that hold this game back from perfection.
Looking back on my list of positives this section is going to sound like a lot of wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Well to put it plainly that is exactly what this is.
First off the opening cast of characters is a bit too broad. It can be an unnecessarily complex process to decide who to use early on in the game especially for someone with a deeper knowledge of the various characters. Staggering the arrival of certain heroes like the Fantastic Four, or having them proceed from a different area to rendezvous with The Avengers, could allow for a chance to get a feel for certain characters without spreading bonus resources too thin. Perhaps adding a few side missions that explain how some of the characters became involved in this quest might also be in order as they seem to work fairly well for some of the unlockable characters and they could help to explain why the likes of Deadpool or Elektra decided to get involved. Also as a minor gripe costume unlocking seems to take much longer as the game wears on and the process does not really reward using different heroes as focused use of one individual character at a time seems to be the best way to unlock costumes. The problem there is that you will have to abandon a character you just spent considerable time building up in order to get alternate costumes for other heroes.
Now for the next contradictory complaint, the difficulty level. If anything this game is a bit too easy. It sort of hits its stride in Act 2 (the game is broken up into five Acts, with a number of missions in each Act) but as your characters get stronger and you become more adept at team combat you can begin to blow through the rank and file without much resistance. This causes some stretches of the game to become a little tedious as you are more or less just knocking everybody down as soon as they step in front of you. Also in the major boss battles once you figure out the weakness of a particular boss they all succumb to simple prompted button press puzzles. While you can become quite good at this game there is nothing to truly master.
Aside from those problems a couple of minor problems also exist. Some characters seem a bit out of place in this game as they don’t seem to fit the bill for galaxy and dimension spanning epics and there aren’t really any sort of street level missions to accommodate those characters. Some minor AI issues may also result in computer controlled characters falling to their deaths or getting in the way in some of the puzzle type objectives. Also there is a bit of power repetition with some heroes having the same power as some others with only the name being changed. Finally a few heroes seem to be missing but you likely won’t miss them for long as some tend to get lost among the crowd anyway.
To sum up Marvel Ultimate Alliance it is simply a fun game that you will want to play through at least once and more than likely multiple times. The Marvel universe is well represented in terms of characters and locations and the game is accessible for both longtime and brand new fans. Overall the game is an enjoyable experience that has just enough little annoyances to keep it from reaching its true potential.