Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Ultimately satisfying, but just.
Published: November 28, 2006
It's sort of standard for the series, and there has been a slight upgrade to things (there are obviously more animations given that the roster is almost entirely new, and they're pulled off quite nicely). The PS3 version obviously sees the bulk of these, with some fantastic textures (the varnished wood floors in the Mandarin's palace look stellar), and the lighting is obviously much, much better in the next-gen version. Even early on you'll see it in the riveted metal floors where blasts of light will light up the little shader-enhanced nooks and crannies of the floor. Still, there are some questionable textures in the less detailed parts of the game, and any water the heroes step into isn't reactive, which is a shame. Having Blur do some of the cinematics is also a double-edged sword; on the one hand, they look absolutely phenomenal (arguably some of Blur's best work), but the in-game cinemas or the stuff that used in-game assets looks like crap comparatively.
Given the cast of characters, it's not surprising that the voice acting would be a little mixed; fans were offered the opportunity to voice some minor characters (or at least ones that aren't playable), and, surprisingly, these aren't really the bad ones. Having Cam Clark do the voice of Thor was probably a bad idea; he sounds like a complete tool rather than the son of Odin. There's also the issue of your own playable characters repeating the same line about 50 billion times. Reactions are good, and the comments are even chuckle-worthy in some cases, but it quickly gets old after just a few levels.
The game's score is also a little uneven, not so much because the music itself is bad, but rather because the system Raven developed for making it all dynamic leaves little room for transitions -- or rather the transitions themselves aren't very smooth. If you're backtracking a little or running from an area with enemies in it to none, you'll here a terse little series of notes and some percussion just leap to the fore, and it's a shame. The separation in channels on the PS3 version thanks to honest-to-goodness Dolby Digital is very nice indeed, and obviously as you moved down to the PS2 with the faked Dolby Pro-Logic II and the PSP with stereo, things drop a few notices along the way.
So the game looks (relatively) good, sounds (fairly) good and plays... well, it plays like the XML games. And maybe that's the problem. Yes, this was a game more about fan service than creating some kind of paradigm shift in the gameplay, and current-gen was clearly a base target given how some of the next-gen textures and models worked out, but the real issue here is just that it's not terribly interesting. Forget repeat playthroughs, just stumbling through one endless series of boxy rooms and push-to-open doorways starts to get old fairly quickly the first time, and it's really up to the game's online co-op to bolster things.
I like that there was an attempt to integrate some of the PS3's newfound functionality into the package; online play through the PlayStation Network is solid and, at least for the few hours or so I played with random people, lag-free; the integration of SIXAXIS gimmicks was, well, gimmicky, but at least the increased PS3 horsepower and the promise of 1080p (for those that are sold on that bullet point) means this is the best looking and sounding version of the game if you're doing straight comparisons across platforms.
Still, in the end the game is more or less the same; next-gen visuals for the PS3 version can't help that the basic gameplay is the very same sort of mindless button masher that was present in the original PlayStation 2 version. Is it still fun? Yeah, of course, provided you're a comic fan, but 20 hours or so later, it's entirely possible that you won't really want to do this again -- no matter how many characters or in-jokes are added.
