Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Ultimately satisfying, but just.
Published: November 28, 2006
I was among the few who not only knew who developer Raven Software were when they first took on the project of making the first X-Men Legends game, but were convinced that they had no business encroaching on Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath developer Snowblind Studios' racket: the top-down hack and slash RPG. I was, also, horribly wrong; Raven's engine was competent, and its treatment of the X-Men franchise both sated by comic geekiness and built a convincingly solid action RPG in the process.
The sequel, however, didn't do nearly as good a job of convincing me that Raven could duplicate things. It felt far too much like the first one, didn't really introduce anything particularly new into the mix, and just sort of felt like a cash-in. Yeah, sure, it was still fun -- especially if you played through a friend in co-op -- but it wasn't new and certainly didn't feel like a proper sequel to me.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is a proper sequel, though in many ways it merely introduces the things that could or should have been in XML2. Luckily, it's still fun, and those changes, which aren't terribly huge, make the game deeper, more engrossing, and of course there's just more lore to pull from when you're tapping Marvel's entire freakin' Ultimate universe. So congrats, Raven, you guys have proven me wrong, and in the process I've come to respect your work on the series even more than that developer I once though nobody could touch -- but I'm still not letting you entirely off the hook.
For the uninitiated, Raven's formula (which is almost identical across both XML games MUA), goes something like this: four heroes in a party of your choosing are mapped to the four directions of your d-pad. Each of them, being comic book super heroes, have their own powers, which you can activate by holding a shoulder button (or buttons this time around since there's a branching menu system for using more than four powers) and then pressing a corresponding face button. When you aren't dishing out mutie- or alien- or supernaturally-powered attacks, you can simple button mash through light and strong hits, jumping strikes or simple grapples which all throws and lots of face punching.
To be honest, that's about as complex as the game gets, but that's by no means a bad thing; cobbling together four different characters in classic combinations will get you basic bonuses for forming a proper "team" (like, say, Sue Storm, Reed Richards, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm -- better known as The Invisible Woman, Mr. Fantastic, The Human Torch and The Thing or collectively The Fantastic 4), but you can mix and match as you see fit. If you do mix 'n match, the game will reward you slowly for keeping the same team, eventually giving you some of the same bonuses you'd get for going with a pre-assembled version. The trudge, then, is winding your way through a seemingly endless series of hallways peppered with random crates and barrels and destructible terminals or pipes or machinery as you slowly level up your characters and play out the story.
Much has been made of the storyline this time around -- not just because Marvel scribes helped out with it -- but because it culls together appearances by more than one hundred and forty of Marvel's roster (some more obscure than others), and a good two dozen or so of them are playable. This of course means a stupid amount of comic geek fan service, and that was the idea. For all the familiarity in the gameplay, the new, more expansive setting and bigger storyline (that starts with Dr. Doom pulling together nearly every major villain from the various Ultimate comic books and uniting them against Nick Fury and expands out to cover intergalactic threats and heroes) is the real draw here.
The sequel, however, didn't do nearly as good a job of convincing me that Raven could duplicate things. It felt far too much like the first one, didn't really introduce anything particularly new into the mix, and just sort of felt like a cash-in. Yeah, sure, it was still fun -- especially if you played through a friend in co-op -- but it wasn't new and certainly didn't feel like a proper sequel to me.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is a proper sequel, though in many ways it merely introduces the things that could or should have been in XML2. Luckily, it's still fun, and those changes, which aren't terribly huge, make the game deeper, more engrossing, and of course there's just more lore to pull from when you're tapping Marvel's entire freakin' Ultimate universe. So congrats, Raven, you guys have proven me wrong, and in the process I've come to respect your work on the series even more than that developer I once though nobody could touch -- but I'm still not letting you entirely off the hook.
For the uninitiated, Raven's formula (which is almost identical across both XML games MUA), goes something like this: four heroes in a party of your choosing are mapped to the four directions of your d-pad. Each of them, being comic book super heroes, have their own powers, which you can activate by holding a shoulder button (or buttons this time around since there's a branching menu system for using more than four powers) and then pressing a corresponding face button. When you aren't dishing out mutie- or alien- or supernaturally-powered attacks, you can simple button mash through light and strong hits, jumping strikes or simple grapples which all throws and lots of face punching.
To be honest, that's about as complex as the game gets, but that's by no means a bad thing; cobbling together four different characters in classic combinations will get you basic bonuses for forming a proper "team" (like, say, Sue Storm, Reed Richards, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm -- better known as The Invisible Woman, Mr. Fantastic, The Human Torch and The Thing or collectively The Fantastic 4), but you can mix and match as you see fit. If you do mix 'n match, the game will reward you slowly for keeping the same team, eventually giving you some of the same bonuses you'd get for going with a pre-assembled version. The trudge, then, is winding your way through a seemingly endless series of hallways peppered with random crates and barrels and destructible terminals or pipes or machinery as you slowly level up your characters and play out the story.
Much has been made of the storyline this time around -- not just because Marvel scribes helped out with it -- but because it culls together appearances by more than one hundred and forty of Marvel's roster (some more obscure than others), and a good two dozen or so of them are playable. This of course means a stupid amount of comic geek fan service, and that was the idea. For all the familiarity in the gameplay, the new, more expansive setting and bigger storyline (that starts with Dr. Doom pulling together nearly every major villain from the various Ultimate comic books and uniting them against Nick Fury and expands out to cover intergalactic threats and heroes) is the real draw here.
