Title: Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Date: 11.10.2006

Genre: Role Playing, Action

Platform: Xbox 360

Developer: Raven Software

Publisher: Activision

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is an awesome beat 'em up game that has over 20 heroes for the X-Box360 (2 exclusive characters), plenty of bad guys (like Dr. Doom, Loki, and Galactus), and is quite a blast to play, despite some annoying parts and dumb AI partners.

Story

The basic story is that a lot of Marvel's bad guys team up with Dr. Doom to form the Masters of Evil and the only ones that stop them are your team of heroes. It's a great story and gets a little darker towards the end. The side quests also affect the ending of the game. So, if for example, you don't complete one of the side quests, the Legacy Virus kills all of the mutants on Earth. The story is a typical bad guy gets ultimate power plot, but it's done very well in this game, with plenty of boss battles thrown throughout the many levels.

Graphics

The 360 version's graphics are top notch. The CG cut-scenes are simply awesome! The in-game graphics (and cut-scenes) are also quite life-like (although obviously not as good as the CG cut-scenes). All of the stages and enemies look real (except Mephisto for some reason, who looks like a large plastic toy). The snow in the Asgard levels in particular looks almost life-like. Also, when you play as The Human Torch, the fire and smoke are really realistic. I actually returned my opened PS2 version and got the 360 version just for the graphics. (I ended up paying quite a lot more for the game because of this, but it was worth the extra cost.) This game is worth getting for the graphics alone.

Sound

The character voices are all done well, but what really stands out is the exceptional combat music. It sounds like an orchestra and it really gets you into the mood of beating-up everything on the screen. The music changes to combat music whenever you're near enemies. The combat music does sound the same throughout most of the levels, but it's so good that it doesn't get dull. The only glitch I've encountered in the game is that (sometimes) the music will stop altogether and won't come back until the next section of the stage. This has happened quite a few times during the course of the game. It also didn't even play at all during the entire Mephisto boss battle. That's why I subtracted 1 point from the Sound category.

Controls

The controls are easy to learn. You have a jump button (which is also used for double jumping and flying), a grab button, and 2 attack buttons, plus your special powers. The jump button took me quite a bit to get used to, since I usually use A or B to jump, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second-nature. The special powers are accessed by pressing the Right Trigger and one of the four face buttons (A, B, X, or Y). RT + Y is used for your super move, which can only be done when the yellow meter around your character's portrait is glowing yellow. You can have all 4 characters do their super moves if all 4 of them have their Extreme Meter completely full. They do quite a lot of damage, but none of them look good at all.

They all basically have the character jump in the air and then a colored shockwave spreads across the screen. The Left Trigger allows you to change the way the AI acts. You can have them be Aggressive, Defensive, or Neutral. I usually just leave them on Neutral, but the AI can mess you up on some of the boss battles, so it's sometimes good to switch them to Defensive. The Left Bumper is used for Blocking.

During some of the big boss battles, you can only hurt the boss after doing a button pressing mini-game. These mini-games are basically pressing the correct button when it appears on the screen, although sometimes you just have to rapidly press the button that appears on the screen. The only time I had problems with this was during the Galactus boss battle. The button prompts appeared much further apart, almost to the point of thinking that the mini-game was over, and the screen had so much stuff going on, that it was quite hard to even tell what button to press. Because of this annoying part, and most of the Galactus level as a whole, I would never play that level again (more on that later). The controls are quite easy to use once you get used to them and the big boss mini-games are quite fun, for the most part.

Gameplay

All levels are quite linear in where you have to go and you rarely have to back-track in a level. Most levels have at least 4 boss battles (sometimes 2 bosses in one battle) and all levels take at about an hour to beat. You may accidentally not do a side quest because the objectives usually appear on the screen for just a couple of seconds. As for the puzzles in this game, they are usually quite easy and involve matching the floor panel pattern with the correct block, finding switches, or killing the enemies in a certain way (i.e. throw them into the lava). I only got stuck on 2 parts in this entire game. In one part, you had to find a water cauldron to put out the lava and it was quite hard to find the cauldron. The only other spot I got stuck in was because the walkways on the level all looked the same and I got lost trying to find the correct door. If you get lost in this game, all you usually have to do is look at the mini-map on the screen and go to a place that it still red. These places are areas you haven't explored yet.

As for the bosses, some of them die way too quickly, but the main boss of each level is always quite a challenge. Some of them can only be hurt by doing the mini-game, whereas others can be hurt by any attack, but take quite a pounding to defeat. There are only 3 boss battles that I found quite annoying. The Mandarin boss battle was annoying because your AI partners would often destroy the mechanical bugs before you could get them onto the transporter. Mephisto was annoying because he had an attack that he used very, very often that made your characters lose control and walk all over the place uncontrollably. And Galactus was annoying because the mini-game wasn't done as good as other bosses' mini-games. Luckily, Galactus only takes 3 hits to kill, as opposed to 4 hits for most mini-game bosses.

The levels have plenty of destructible statues and other things in it and you can pretty much destroy anything in a level for money (used to level up your characters), red orbs (regain some health), and blue orbs (regain some energy for special moves). The levels are quite long (about an hour each) and are broken-up into several hubs. Each hub has about 4-5 levels in them, which must be done sequentially (except Asgard). The whole game takes about 13 hours to finish, if you skip some of the side quests (either on purpose or by accident). The only level that I didn't like was the one with Galatcus. The save points on that level were too far apart and the end chase was quite frustrating because your AI partners would just stand at the edge and wait for Galactus to break the walkway underneath them (and thus kill them). Also, there is one part where a skyscraper is smashed onto the walkway and you are supposed to jump/fly onto a higher area and then jump/fly back down to the lower walkway. This would be fine, except that it is very hard to figure out that you are supposed to do this. Also, you can't see the lower walkway when you are on the higher one, so you have to make a leap of faith and hope that you land on the walkway (and not plummet to your doom). This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to re-do 10 minutes of the level every time you died because the last save point was so far behind!

The AI is a mixed bag. They are good at attacking enemies, but they never avoid traps on the levels (i.e. lasers) and they fall off walkways and platforms way too many times (and thus die quite a lot). You can't revive a character until 4 minutes have passed since they died. So you may wind up having only 1 character left for the final boss fight because your AI partners either committed suicide by walking off into a bottomless pit or hit too many traps. Because of these things, it is definitely better to play with as many human players as possible. This brings me to the Replay Value portion of my review.

Replay Value

This game is a blast to play with human players and you can either compete against each other to see who does the best in each section or you can play co-op and focus your attention on teamwork instead. Because of this, you will have a blast playing this game with friends. Sadly, there isn't much reason to replay the game from the beginning again, unless you want to complete all the side-quests you missed and thus get the best ending. There is real difference in playing the game again, because all the enemies are the same (although you can play it at a higher difficulty level). I had a blast playing this game, but I don't think I'll ever replay it from the beginning again because there isn't really anything else left to unlock. The only replaying I will be doing with this game is replaying all the cool boss fights with my saves from the 1st time through the game. One small complaint I have with the saves is that you only have a limited number of save slots (even though the 360 has quite a few GBs of free space on the Hard Drive). So, I had to back-up my first set of saves onto a memory card and then save my new saves over the original ones on the Hard Drive. Each save only takes up about 250 kbs.

Overall

This game is a blast to play with friends, despite some annoying parts and bad AI partners and it has a great story and superb graphics and BGM. I'd definitely recommend buying it because it takes awhile to finish it and you'll enjoy ever minute of playing it. It's not as much fun if you're playing it by yourself, but it's at least worth a rent (and you can always play it online with people).

Game Score

B+

Reviewed By: Contributed