The first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game was pretty awesome. It was one of the greatest Marvel beat’em ups ever released and it wrought pure ethereal fanboy joy whenever you played the game with three of your friends on the couch. Overall, Ultimate Alliance 2 keeps the same game mechanics from the first game, but it just doesn’t quite give the players a better or even equal playing experience. Certainly the new addition of fusion powers (combining 2 heroes powers together for double the damage) is cool initially, but there are many clones that ruin the awe of possibilities when you play through the tutorial stage. In fact, that’s a way to describe the progression of the game. As the game goes on, there is less and less to expect from it which culminates in a pretty mundane feeling as you complete it.
Ultimate Alliance 2 is a combination of about three big summer story arcs smashed and crammed into one game. You start playing in the team of Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man and Wolverine tearing through Dr. Doom’s castle in Latveria trying to defeat the Tinkerer. Once that’s done, the heroes bicker amongst themselves and with Nick Fury about the repercussions of invading a foreign country and the possibility of terrorist attacks on the U.S in retaliation. The story jumps from these eminent terrorist plots to the Civil War story arc and then to an odd plot twist involving nanomachines that is downright retarded. Needless to say, the climax of the game is pretty much ridiculous and totally nonsensical.
YAY:
- Nothing is more fun then booting up a game with your friends and beating the living crap out of thugs, supervillains, and robots in co-op. The multiplayer system allows you and your friends to jump in and out of the game at will and even put your character on auto-pilot should you need to take a vital bathroom break in between boss battles, which is much appreciated. The game promotes your team to decimate and destroy as many enemies and objects as possible and it even leaves you with “this is awesome right now” moments with your friends.
- The controls have remained unchanged for the most part since the last installment and that is fantastic. You don’t need to have been playing games for years to just pick up the controller and start spamming the only two attack buttons to annihilate the opposition. Friends, girl friends, young audiences, elderly, anyone can play the game and have a remote amount of fun.
NAY:
- The character selection in Ultimate Alliance 2 is pretty terrible. Yeah, most of the main Marvel icons are present, but the characters that you really want to play like the Hulk and Thor are locked away and need a certain amount of collectible Asgard runes in order to have them join your team. This is pretty ridiculous considering the fact that the rest of the cast is unlocked just by playing the game. Why in the world would you lock away two powerhouse fan favorites because you want the player to spend fifteen extra minutes in the super linear level looking for breakable boxes that houses these stupid runes? BAH! Even despite this awful idea, certain characters do not even belong on screen like Song Bird and Penance. Why would you include these two dopes over, lemme see umm Colossus? Cyclops? Hercules? Abomination? I could go on forever with better character choices.
- The bugs render the game borderline unplayable at parts. Every single jump you make could have game-breaking consequences as you could get stuck floating in air, stuck in a buddies’ character model, or just fall through the floor. Granted this does not happen every 5 minutes, but it happens probably every hour of gameplay. It honestly forces you to ask if Vicarious Visions even tested this game at any point in time.
- Whoever wrote the storyline to the Ultimate Alliance 2 needs their head examined. Character choices do not make sense, inter-character dialogue is often laughable, and the repetition of bosses is irritating. If the above synopsis intrigues you, well then I guess snuggling up to this game in between your sessions of watching Transformers 2 is the way to go.
- There is simply not enough content here to warrant a $60 purchase. Each character only has one alternate costume, and they’re probably the costumes you don’t ever want to see on that character again. The collectible art only reminds you of how terrible some of the development team’s choices are, and the Cinemas are rendered like clay-animation. What were they thinking?
After Raven Software’s success with Ultimate Alliance, you would think that Activision would actually care about the quality of it’s follow-up. Raven Software gave the player an awesomely authentic Marvel experience the first time around and plenty of content to sift through for days. Vicarious Visions ultimately dropped the entire universe with Ultimate Alliance 2. Granted the two games play similarly but as you delve deeper into the sequel, you’ll realize just how lazy Vicarious Visions was when developing this game. But quality really wasn’t your goal, right Activision?
