Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Posted November 25, 2006
Combining the colossal number of characters in the Marvel world of comics, Ultimate Alliance speaks volumes to the legions of comic book geeks who happen to own a next generation console. Using the fabled arch-villain Doctor Doom, superheroes are united in battling his conglomeration of villains, who seem dead set to empower their leader with godlike abilities. Under the leadership of Nick Fury, heroes such as Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Captain America, Deadpool, various X-Men, Silver Surfer, and the everlasting badass Wolverine are united for the single purpose of saving the world. 
The game uses a slight comic style of presentation for the various cut scenes. While not as snazzy as Activision's Ultimate Spider-man, Ultimate Alliance still manages to capture the fast moving comic inspired world. The main cut scenes are actually fancy FMV movies rather than using the in-game engine video. There are talkative scenes that use the in-game engine, but nothing very exciting. Most of the dialogue is well written, but the game doesn't offer conversation choices; which leads to a fairly linear experience.
Gameplay:
The main single player storyline is broken into five acts with a grand total of twelve missions. Missions are typically split into several smaller portions which allows for a more succinct gaming experience, especially for those seeking short bursts of playtime. Level locales consist of areas in the Marvel universe such as Atlantis, Stark Tower, Dr. Strange's abode, Mephisto's Realm, Asgard, The Watcher's Tower, and Castle Doom.
Before a level starts, the player can choose a team of four superheroes. At the outset of the game, the team is pre-selected as Captain America, Spider-Man, Thor and Wolverine. As the game progresses, super-heroes become unlocked and new teams can be formed. Certain combinations of heroes will provide a percentage bonus to the team's damage rate, experienced earned, resistance defense, energy earned, health earned, etc. For instance, using the entire Fantastic Four team will provide an extra 20 health points per enemy knockout. Additionally, using the same team continually will provide team points. These points can be spent on increasing stats for the overall group.
Characters also have the ability to be empowered on an individual basis. Each Marvel hero earns certain abilities as they rank up during the various levels. The player has the option of allowing the game to auto-select powers or health increases. Each player has three costumes to unlock; which offer bonuses to their specific powers. For example, the classic Wolverine outfit will increase his health regeneration rate as well as boosting defense. The player has the option of purchasing these multipliers via the character customization menu. The game does an excellent job of explaining powers and upgrades to the player before using a precious point or limited amount of money.
The enemy A.I. has a variety of attack modes, but they lack any flanking abilities or advanced intelligence. Dependent on the type of enemy, they will use melee or ranged attack to take out your entire team. For the most part, enemies will only attack in groups of 2 to 4 and mainly focus on the player controlled character. The single player A.I. occasionally distracts the enemy fighters, but cannot perform much damage; even as a group. The friendly A.I. extremely hamstrings the damage capabilities of your teammates. It's as I was going into battle with 1 player controlled superheroes and three regular humans. They rarely used the main powered attacks and barely kept the attention of the enemy. In fact, the only benefit to having those teammates was the automatic activation of the area attacks when I activated my own.
Depending on the specific superhero, player control can be a bit on the clunky side. Traveling is a pain with the heroes that don't have a speedy form of travel like Spider-Man's web slinging or Thor's flight. Heroes like The Thing just rumble along and have limited jumping capabilities. The fighting system is finer tuned though. Players have access to assigning specific attacks to certain buttons on the controller. Additionally, the powered attacks, which require button combinations, are simply to perform in a series to destroy the opposition. The 360 controller makes fighting the onslaught of Doom's minions pretty simple.
The multiplayer aspect of the game seems adds a much needed co-op addition built for a faction of the Xbox Live community. Spilt into two modes, co-op can be played naturally, allowing the game to spilt experience, or competitively, forcing players to compete for kills and the entire lot of experience. Oddly, only the player who set up the co-op match will get the progress in their overall campaign saved game. The other players do not get to save their character stats that were earned in the course of each played level. While co-op mode can be fun with friends, the benefits are few for those who connect to a game rather than host.
The achievements are broken into 46 tasks for 1000 gamerscore points. The entire lot of points is awarded for completing single player objectives. Many of the larger point totals are assigned to defeating bosses and completing levels. That comprises about half of the total point spread. The remainder is given for collective achievements such as killing 4000 enemies, tossing 500 enemies into the abyss, or answering 150 Marvel trivia questions correctly. The entire achievement set will take in the neighborhood of twenty hours to accomplish, specifically due to running through the entire game on the hard level of difficulty. Raven Software should be commending for creating an achievement set that's difficult to complete, yet very entertaining to finish as well.
Graphics:
The overhead view, similar to Freedom Force, doesn't push the limits of the graphical capabilities of the Xbox 360. While the game is still very sharp on a HD set, the colorful graphics still seem designed for the last generation of consoles. The FMV movies are aged and do not represent the actual visual status of the game. The level design is faithful to their comic inspired counterparts, but the textures are ugly and muddy when looking closely. The frame rate chugs a bit during the major boss battle scenes or when a large number of visual effects populate the screen.
Audio:
The auditory quality of the game is a bit suspect. The voiceovers make attempts to emulate their Hollywood counterparts, but fail to convincingly replicate for the most part. Wolverine, Spider-Man, or any of the Fantastic Four are only moderately comparative to their movie counterparts. The dialogue and writing is decent, but not overly exceptional. The soundtrack is comprised of a variety of rousing heroic tunes and effectively crescendo at the appropriate times; battle or boss fights. Unfortunately, the sound effects are the most repetitive portion of the audio. Listening to Wolverine continually grunt /roar the first few levels is fun, but becomes grating when nearing the finality of the game.
Conclusion:
Is Marvel: Ultimate Alliance worth the MSRP price for the single player? Depending on the difficulty level played, the single player game could be knocked out in a rental period on Easy. The latter two levels require more of a time investment and picking up achievements requires many hours. For Marvel fanatics, I recommend picking this up around the $30 to $40 mark. Everyone else should give it a rent and see if the single player campaign plus the limited co-op mode is worth shelling out the bucks for.
The game uses a slight comic style of presentation for the various cut scenes. While not as snazzy as Activision's Ultimate Spider-man, Ultimate Alliance still manages to capture the fast moving comic inspired world. The main cut scenes are actually fancy FMV movies rather than using the in-game engine video. There are talkative scenes that use the in-game engine, but nothing very exciting. Most of the dialogue is well written, but the game doesn't offer conversation choices; which leads to a fairly linear experience.
Gameplay:
The main single player storyline is broken into five acts with a grand total of twelve missions. Missions are typically split into several smaller portions which allows for a more succinct gaming experience, especially for those seeking short bursts of playtime. Level locales consist of areas in the Marvel universe such as Atlantis, Stark Tower, Dr. Strange's abode, Mephisto's Realm, Asgard, The Watcher's Tower, and Castle Doom.
Before a level starts, the player can choose a team of four superheroes. At the outset of the game, the team is pre-selected as Captain America, Spider-Man, Thor and Wolverine. As the game progresses, super-heroes become unlocked and new teams can be formed. Certain combinations of heroes will provide a percentage bonus to the team's damage rate, experienced earned, resistance defense, energy earned, health earned, etc. For instance, using the entire Fantastic Four team will provide an extra 20 health points per enemy knockout. Additionally, using the same team continually will provide team points. These points can be spent on increasing stats for the overall group.
Characters also have the ability to be empowered on an individual basis. Each Marvel hero earns certain abilities as they rank up during the various levels. The player has the option of allowing the game to auto-select powers or health increases. Each player has three costumes to unlock; which offer bonuses to their specific powers. For example, the classic Wolverine outfit will increase his health regeneration rate as well as boosting defense. The player has the option of purchasing these multipliers via the character customization menu. The game does an excellent job of explaining powers and upgrades to the player before using a precious point or limited amount of money.
The enemy A.I. has a variety of attack modes, but they lack any flanking abilities or advanced intelligence. Dependent on the type of enemy, they will use melee or ranged attack to take out your entire team. For the most part, enemies will only attack in groups of 2 to 4 and mainly focus on the player controlled character. The single player A.I. occasionally distracts the enemy fighters, but cannot perform much damage; even as a group. The friendly A.I. extremely hamstrings the damage capabilities of your teammates. It's as I was going into battle with 1 player controlled superheroes and three regular humans. They rarely used the main powered attacks and barely kept the attention of the enemy. In fact, the only benefit to having those teammates was the automatic activation of the area attacks when I activated my own.
Depending on the specific superhero, player control can be a bit on the clunky side. Traveling is a pain with the heroes that don't have a speedy form of travel like Spider-Man's web slinging or Thor's flight. Heroes like The Thing just rumble along and have limited jumping capabilities. The fighting system is finer tuned though. Players have access to assigning specific attacks to certain buttons on the controller. Additionally, the powered attacks, which require button combinations, are simply to perform in a series to destroy the opposition. The 360 controller makes fighting the onslaught of Doom's minions pretty simple.
The multiplayer aspect of the game seems adds a much needed co-op addition built for a faction of the Xbox Live community. Spilt into two modes, co-op can be played naturally, allowing the game to spilt experience, or competitively, forcing players to compete for kills and the entire lot of experience. Oddly, only the player who set up the co-op match will get the progress in their overall campaign saved game. The other players do not get to save their character stats that were earned in the course of each played level. While co-op mode can be fun with friends, the benefits are few for those who connect to a game rather than host.
The achievements are broken into 46 tasks for 1000 gamerscore points. The entire lot of points is awarded for completing single player objectives. Many of the larger point totals are assigned to defeating bosses and completing levels. That comprises about half of the total point spread. The remainder is given for collective achievements such as killing 4000 enemies, tossing 500 enemies into the abyss, or answering 150 Marvel trivia questions correctly. The entire achievement set will take in the neighborhood of twenty hours to accomplish, specifically due to running through the entire game on the hard level of difficulty. Raven Software should be commending for creating an achievement set that's difficult to complete, yet very entertaining to finish as well.
Graphics:
The overhead view, similar to Freedom Force, doesn't push the limits of the graphical capabilities of the Xbox 360. While the game is still very sharp on a HD set, the colorful graphics still seem designed for the last generation of consoles. The FMV movies are aged and do not represent the actual visual status of the game. The level design is faithful to their comic inspired counterparts, but the textures are ugly and muddy when looking closely. The frame rate chugs a bit during the major boss battle scenes or when a large number of visual effects populate the screen.
Audio:
The auditory quality of the game is a bit suspect. The voiceovers make attempts to emulate their Hollywood counterparts, but fail to convincingly replicate for the most part. Wolverine, Spider-Man, or any of the Fantastic Four are only moderately comparative to their movie counterparts. The dialogue and writing is decent, but not overly exceptional. The soundtrack is comprised of a variety of rousing heroic tunes and effectively crescendo at the appropriate times; battle or boss fights. Unfortunately, the sound effects are the most repetitive portion of the audio. Listening to Wolverine continually grunt /roar the first few levels is fun, but becomes grating when nearing the finality of the game.
Conclusion:
Is Marvel: Ultimate Alliance worth the MSRP price for the single player? Depending on the difficulty level played, the single player game could be knocked out in a rental period on Easy. The latter two levels require more of a time investment and picking up achievements requires many hours. For Marvel fanatics, I recommend picking this up around the $30 to $40 mark. Everyone else should give it a rent and see if the single player campaign plus the limited co-op mode is worth shelling out the bucks for.