NerdMentality | XBOX 360 REVIEW – Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

Viewing Entry

XBOX 360 REVIEW – Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

Posted October 6th 2009 by Frankie Aguilar.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is an amalgamation of a lot of things people complain about in video games. It's a sequel, to a Diablo clone, based on a brand name, and made by a new creative team. That brand however, happens to be Marvel and the game is a sequel to the awesome 2006 beat em up Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. What Raven studios brought to us in the previous installment was a flawed, but fun experience that let you play as your favorite Marvel heroes.

The story follows two of the best crossover events in Marvel history, Secret War and Civil War. If you haven't read either of these here's a quick overview of the two stories. Secret War recounts the events of an unsanctioned black op mission led by Nick Fury that prompts an attack on US soil. This forces the U.S. government to consider registering super humans to monitor their activities. When a group of young fame-seeking heroes bring about the destruction of an entire town, the government pushes through the Superhuman Registration Act, splitting the caped community in half, between those for and against the act.

This divide makes for a large part of the story and gameplay. It has been en vogue for a while now to have branching storylines and multiple endings in games. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 uses the fantastic Civil War story line to not only add replayabilty to itself, but to have the player more invested in the game. Having you choose between Pro-Registration and Anti-Registration, will make you pause to consider which side you'd like to join. It'll probably come down to you choosing which characters you'd rather use, but maybe it'll actually think about what you'd really choose in that situation. It's a little deeper than your normal button mashing story, and the game is better for it.

Controlling four heroes at a time, you fight your way through either of these two stories. While the roster you're allowed doesn't canonically make sense, the effect is a fanboys dream. Having Spider-Man team up with Wolverine or the Human Torch happens all the time, but having all three of the team up with Captain America? Awesome to the max! Using your team has been streamlined from the previous installment. No longer do you have to wait till save spots to switch your characters, which is now possible on the fly, and being able to utilize your entire teams power's the way you want is really fun.

These game is filled with little things that make the game really enjoyable. For starters navigating through the maps is made easier by a few of the characters double jump moves. If you click the Y button with any character you get a standard jump. But hit it again with Iron Man or the Human Torch and you'll be flying all around the map. Some of the upgrades have made the game a little to easy though. I found myself tending to use the Human Torch's area attacks to wipe out as many enemies as I could, and met little to no resistance. Camping my character in the middle of a group of bad guys and spamming area attacks worked better than the fusion attacks. But seeing my enemies run around on engulfed in fire looks beautiful.

The visuals in this game are surprisingly good for the amount of fighting and explosions going on, on screen. Third person button mashers tend to drop the graphical quality for quantity of enemies and background environment but in Ultimate Alliance 2, everything you see is given a proper dose of polish. There's always something exploding and the particle effects that come with those explosions look just as good as the attacks coming from the heroes. And when the side of a building explodes, pieces actually fly off and stay on the ground where they fall, a trait that some graphically superior games can't even claim. Vicarious Visions definitely put a lot of effort into carrying on the quality established with the first installment of the Ultimate Alliance series. But it does fall short in some places.

Beat 'em ups tend to get one dimensional fairly quickly. In the vein of Diablo clones, the basic fighting technique consists of mashing buttons. There are two or three combos that players can use to rake in more experience points, but leveling your characters is not difficult. At one point in time this game was called Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion, because of its new tag team attacks that let you combine two heroes' powers. These "fusion" attacks break up the gameplay, and comes in pretty handy during the more difficult encounters. My favorite fusion attacks are the ones that implement Spider-Man and an energy attack user. Spider-Man uses his webs to catch up to ten enemies and someone like Iron Man or the Human Torch blasts them all into oblivion. It's a slow motion beat down of epic proportions.

One of the most painful things about playing this game is the voice acting. The dialog is pretty corny to begin with, but attempting to adapt a comic book story line for an uninitiated audience, wouldn't come across as anything less. But with a game that attempts to immerse its players the way this one does, you'd think they could get some decent voice talent. It really sounds like one guy did all the voices, male and female, and none of them well. The background music is ambient enough, but really is nothing more than white noise. It seems like the overall sound in this game wasn't a point of emphasis, which is a mistake with a dialog heavy game.

Overall this is a game for comic books and beat em up fans. If you're both, than this game is what you've been waiting for. The collection aspect, huge roster of characters, and branching story line will have you playing this game for weeks. But the repetitive nature of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 might scare away casual gamers. Beat em ups have a certain depth to them, and finding that depth might be too much for people who aren't fans of the genre. You can play this game with your friends but coordinating all four characters on one screen is tedious and not worth it. Baring the the brand, games like these are a dime a dozen. What sets it apart is the characters that you play as. If the Marvel universe is something you enjoy or want to get into, this is a game that you should check out. Otherwise it's just another sequel.