Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - Completed


Another one of those games that my past influences me to play. Being as I still have around 200 comic books sitting in my garage (mostly marvel) how could this game not have appeal. The game is a 3^rd person hack in slash, in the same style as X-men Legends. The characters include marvel legends such as: FF, Avengers, Spiderman, and a few X-men. The characters that proved to be my favorites would be Iron man and Captain American. The game has a unlock system that seems to be based on the amount of kills you get with each character. For instance with Iron man I was able to unlock his classic armor as well as his Man o War armor. These tidbits did wonders for the nostalgia of the game.

Now something to take into account is I played this game first on the PSP and then on the PC and hated it. The pc controls are completely unreasonable. You have to click the mouse to move the character and click the same button to attack. It was quite the debacle and really kept the game from being enjoyable. The day after I bought my 360 I went to Brian’s house and since I only had table tennis he let me borrow M:UA. On the 360 (with no clicking and a GOOD analog stick) the controls are smooth and work as one would expect. This changed my entire view of the game and I actually started to enjoy it.

The story is quite typical, the masters of evil are trying to destroy the universe as we know it. Only the collective of super hero’s can band together in order to stop the tyranny at hand. The CGI cut scenes are amazing, if we could only get an ultimate avengers movie done in this style I would pay $9 to see it. Then when it transitions to the game screens it looks well done as long as there are no close ups. Then things get a little blocky and N64ish.

For the most part you just hack… slash… rinse… repeat to get through the game. The boss battles are a little less difficult then you might expect. Perhaps this was because I was being a slacker and played the game on easy. When you encounter the bosses it seems half of them use the “Press this button” syndrome. This seems to lack the epic feeling that you should get while fighting Galactus. Honestly its mother fucking going to devour your world Galactus. Yet all I have to do is throw two switches and let the silver surfer fly around his head like a bug. This is no way to combat one of the most powerful beings in the universe.

The game is fun for the comic book wanna be hero’s like myself. But I would call it 7 out of 10. Content, graphics, controls are all good. But lacks being epic to give the game a final polish and could have been 10 if they would have let me tear it up with the punisher.