Product

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Platform

PlayStation 2

Publisher

Activison

Rating

★★★☆☆

Summary

A fun multiplayer beat-em-up with RPG elements, Though inferior to it’s predecessor in several ways.

Review

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is the sequel, of sorts, to X-Men Legends 2. Like the X-Men Legends games, Ultimate Alliance is an action RPG, where you plough through enemies to acquire experience points, money and items to upgrade your characters with. You can have up to four player characters at one time, with those not currently controlled by a player being handled by the computer. You can change which character you are controlling at any time, but most players will have a favourite that they will use as much as possible.

Ultimate Alliance is a superhero game, and every character has a slew of special abilities, including flight, super strength, electrical blasts and magic. The characters are an eclectic mix, drawn from throughout the Marvel universe. They range from mutants of the X-Men to Thor, the god of thunder. As a superhero game there are other things the characters can do, such as destroying the scenery, throwing large objects and throwing enemies around. Every character has a range of basic punches, kicks and grapples he can perform.

The settings, like the characters, come from all over the place. They include giant helicopters, alien cities, Atlantis(why is there always an underwater level?) and Aesguard, home of the norse gods.

Compared to X-Men Legends 2, the game system is substantially improved. You can now rearrange your characters skill points freely, rather than having to spend a big lump of cash for the privilege. This means you always have quick access to all of your character’s powers. Also, the grapple feature, where you can grab enemies to punch their lights out, throw them of ledges, or disarm them wasn’t present in X-Men Legends 2. However, I find the storyline and setting for X-Men Legends 2 to be superior. The eclectic mix of characters and locations is less satisfying than the dark and gritty setting with just the X-Men. The environments if Mavel Ultimate Alliance seem to be much less interactive than the earlier game. Less stuff will break, fewer things for super-strong characters to throw around, that kind of thing.

Like most ‘hack-and-slash’ RPGs, Ultimate Alliance is much, much more fun as a multiplayer game. While the computer can control up to three characters, it’s just much more fun with someone beside you. It’s a shame that a couple of required mini-games are one-player only.

Overall, Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a fun multi-player game that doesn’t quite live up to it’s predecessor.

★★★☆☆

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