Uneasy Alliance
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has buffed the familiar super-powered hack-n-slash to a brilliant sheen, but hasn't really added much else.
Published: December 1, 2009
In fact, one could rightly say that things have been removed. I'm sure Vicarious Visions would use the word "streamlined" but however you phrase it the lack of gear to loot removes one of the more strategic and interesting parts of going off the beaten path. That's not to say there haven't been noticeable improvements to the whole interface; far, far less time is spent in menus now as the most common bits of leveling up and allocation of the medals that now buff everyone in the squad have been moved to simple little icons hidden under a press of the Select button. Little touches like having the AI seamlessly step in and take over for players that are in menus when playing online co-op keep the game moving in a much more continuous flow instead of coming to a dead stop while menus are perused.
There are also numerous carrots being dangled over the heads of everyone playing. Bonus objectives have progress bars showing how many crates have been destroyed or enemies taken out in a specific way, which not only helps chart your progress toward bonus XP and Trophies in a much more detailed fashion, but serves as a constant reminder of other things you can be doing beyond just punching the crap out of yet another grunt. Again, though, these are essentially refinements or window dressing to an already familiar formula, and while they're certainly welcome, they don't fundamentally change the overall gameplay, merely make it more palatable.
The engine is also a bit inconsistent; moments of heavy action can bog things down, though now it's for pretty obvious reasons; the textures, animations and overall visual pop of the game is noticeably better than anything else running on the Alchemy Engine in the past. The detail is such that they apparently opted to run a bunch of cutscenes with what looks like the same assets you'd see in the game, though they've been given an extra lighting pass to help them look a little closer to the absolutely brilliant pre-rendered bits Blur Studio did in the past. Each of the environments has a different visual tone and though things are still tile-based (or at least look it), there's not quite as much obvious repetition to the setpieces.
Things are likewise a little spotty on the aural end of things, too; some of the voice work is great and dead-on, while other voices are weirdly hokey. Nearly all of the quips, though, start to grate after a few hours simply because there's so few of them and those that do show up end up hitting so often that you'll sarcastically mutter them alongside the in-game character after just a few hours. About the only real bright side to everything is Deadpool's infamous fourth-wall-breaking comments, which, like Deadpool himself, never really seemed to get old. The thwacks, smacks and various other attacks all sound solid, with meaty, bass-rich explosions and some inoffensive but not especially memorable music being piped through the background.
It's going to be interesting to see how Vicarious Visions handles things their second time out (that is if Activision doesn't hand the reins back to Raven). They clearly have a solid engine and are intimately familiar with it, and the few additions made to help whittle down the amount of menu crawling or the constant progress bars on things were clearly positive additions to the well-established formula. Now, it'll come down to actually improving the gameplay and making it a little more diverse -- no matter who actually tackles the development of things next time out.
If you haven't yet burned out on the four-person squad-based button mashing antics, then this is most definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the gameplay that has helped sell the last three games has been preserved and gussied up with a handful of shortcuts, but if you've played any of the previous games in the series (or even the genre), then you're going to know exactly what to expect. Nothing more, nothing less.
