Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Make your own Dream Team.
Tags: Marvel Ultimate Alliance Categories: Reviews, Xbox Reviews
Posted by Mark "MadMup" Zwolanek on Nov 27th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Marvel Ultimate Alliance (title page) | 1 - 4 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Role-Playing (Action) | Yes | ||
Ever wanted to see Wolverine and Ghost Rider team up with Elektra and Captain America to beat up robots and supervillians? No? What in the world’s wrong with you?! And why are you reading this?
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Marvel Ultimate Alliance pretty much delivers on the promise in its name, giving players the opportunity to team up heroes from all across the Marvel Comics universe to defeat Dr. Doom, who has gathered up supervillians from across the same spectrum into a “Masters of Evil” group that is intent on (what else?) taking over the world. It’s never entirely clear what villains will do with the world once they’ve taken it over, but with a group name like “Masters of Evil,” it’s probably not going to be good, so it’s best if some heroes are dispatched to take care of the problem. Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. does the dispatching, gathering familiar faces like Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Thor and less familiar faces like Luc Cage, Ms. Marvel, and Spider Woman. Once all of the characters have been opened up, players can create teams of four from over 20 characters, recreating famous teams like the Fantastic Four or The New Avengers, or creating brand-new fantasy teams. Throughout the game, players will come in contact with more than 100 other characters from the Marvel Universe, including characters no one but the most obsessive fan has ever heard of.
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To say this game borrows heavily from the X-Men Legends games would be like calling Daredevil “blind.” While it is technically true, it doesn’t give a complete picture. Marvel Ultimate Alliance is basically the same game as the X-Men Legends games, but with a few upgrades. The same four-person team dynamic is here, as is the basic control scheme. Any team member can be selected and played by pressing the corresponding direction on the d-pad, special powers are utilized by holding the right trigger and a button, and so on. The upgrades? Well, the selectable heroes, while still including a few X-Men (Wolverine, Storm, Iceman), range across the whole Marvel universe. That’s enough right there to warrant a game purchase, but the game goes further.
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Marvel Ultimate Alliance is an “action RPG.” Characters are controlled by the player, victories earn XP, and XP earns character upgrades. Gear is also found or unlocked throughout the game, and characters can be equipped with gear that will enhance their powers. The assignment of XP points for upgrades and the equipping of gear can be set to automatic, which lets the player concentrate on playing and on the story without having to worry about making sure points are spent correctly. This represents the biggest upgrade in the play mechanic, as it allows for casual gamers to enjoy the game but also lets hardcore gamers turn off the automatic features and fine-tune and choose their character upgrades specifically.
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Co-op mode comes into its own with this game as well, allowing four players to each control a hero at the same time – without being limited to the same Xbox. That’s right, players can connect via Xbox Live to play through the whole game cooperatively. This is a fantastic feature, and every game developer out there ought to be including this in every game they ever make ever. Yes, that might seem like an overstatement, but cooperative play adds so much to the experience that it’s hard to stress how fantastic a feature this really is.
The voice cast assembled for this game does an excellent job. While movie fans have grown accustomed to Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, once the initial jarringness of the different voices is gotten past, gamers will feel the voices are right on for these characters.
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The one weak point the game has is the graphics. Some environments are muddy-looking, and it can be difficult to distinguish the heroes from the enemies they are engaging in battle. Luckily heroes don’t damage each other, but a misplaced exploding barrel can damage other team members, and it would be nice if they were able to be seen a bit better.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ A vast gallery of selectable Marvel heroes + Online co-op play + Automatic powers and gear upgrades |
9.1 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Graphics are muddy in places, with team members indistinguishable from villians - Pretty much exactly the same game as the X-Men Legends series - What, no Punisher??? |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Are you a Marvel comics fan? Do yourself a favor and play this game. Once you're done, start hoping with me that they will some day work out the licensing issues to do a Marvel/DC game like this so we can see Spider-Man and Batman pair up to bring down... oh, pretty much anybody. We can hope, right? | |
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Tags: Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Posted by Mark "MadMup" Zwolanek on Nov 27th, 2006 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
