Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Good Beat-’Em-Up, Tons of Marvel Superheroes, But Really Friggin’ Buggy

Share on Facebook posted 09-20-09 by Angelo D'Argenio

Marvel Ultimate Alliance was a decent game. It was a top-down multiplayer action RPG based on a much simplified version of the X-Men Legends gameplay system. It was hit or miss for die-hard comic fans and casual dabblers alike. For every massive criticism of the gameplay, there was a compliment about the graphics; for every interesting system element, there was someone angered about the liberties taken with Marvel’s canonical plotlines. In the end, the game amounted to a decent beat-’em-up with RPG elements that managed to cross over tons of Marvel superheroes, even the really obscure ones, and there wasn’t much more we could ask for without getting very nitpicky. Overall, it was an enjoyable experience that wasn’t one of the greatest games of its time, but was memorable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I am not reviewing Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I am reviewing its sequel, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which just hit stores late last week. Once again my original opinion of the game was “this is decent,” but I noticed right off the bat that the gameplay system had been simplified even further from Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 and its predecessors X-Men Legends. The only real customization you will find in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is in how you level up your skills and powers. This is fine, however, because I can’t tell you how annoying it was to stop and enter the menu every three frickin’ seconds back when I was playing X-Men Legends. What this does do, however, is reduce the game to little more than a button masher. Characters level up by defeating enemies, finishing missions, finding medals, and even via a Marvel comics quiz you can take to prove how geeky you are, so you are pretty much always getting stronger as long as you are doing something. But since the enemies get more powerful too, you sometimes have trouble seeing any real progress. The RPG elements are cool and do add to the depth of the game, but in the end your thumb speed will matter more than your strategic planning. The game’s designers themselves have all but admitted this fact, as they have added an “auto-level” function, which spends your “power points” for you, basically creating the character build that the computer thinks is best. In fact, there is a bug in the game that keeps turning this option on even if you don’t want it on, so in some cases it may be better to ignore the RPG elements of the game altogether.

If you look at the game as a straightforward beat-’em-up, you’ll actually be quite pleased. There are tons of Marvel superheros to choose from, and many of them are too obscure for even me to recognize, and I’m a pretty hardcore geek. Fortunately enough, one of the heroes you can control is Deadpool, and that more than made the game for me. Each hero is “unique” to an extent, but you’ll notice some obvious similarities in fighting styles, which make some characters feel more like cloned palette swaps than actual unique fighters. Once again this doesn’t actually matter all that much. I mean, how different do you expect The Thing and The Hulk to play anyway. Characters use weak attacks, strong attacks, and special powers to massacre their way through the enemy forces, which is nothing new to the series. However, characters can now also combine their powers with the new “fusion” system, which essentially produces awesome superhero combo techniques. It sounds, and at first looks, awesome to see superheroes working together, but you soon realize that there isn’t much variety in the fusion system. When Johnny Storm teams up with another hero to shoot a fire beam at a guy, it’s pretty much the same as Cyclops shooting an eye beam at a guy, or Iron Man shooting a uni-beam at a guy, or any number of stock animations that are reused over and over again. In fact, one fusion technique simply involves both of your characters running around the stage and beating people up, and in the end it’s not all that different from simply controlling your characters separate and beating people up.

The story of the game is once again decent. The game spans both the Secret War and Civil War plotlines of the Marvel comic universe, but as before, it takes some serious liberties with the plot itself. None of these are really outstanding, and in the end it won’t bother anyone but the most diehard obsessive comic geeks out there. Of course, considering that the whole Civil War thing is going on, you will be expected to choose a side, and this limits your choice of heroes. The game is somewhat nonlinear in this way, in that it has several branching points that affect the way the game plays out. It’s a cheap way to increase replay value but what can I say, it works. Gamers will be spending tons of time just trying to unlock their favorite Marvel superhero, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The voice acting is really hit or miss in the game. Characters like Wolverine sound the way they should, but others like Spider-Man leave you wondering whether or not they simply picked a random high-school kid up off the street. Stan Lee’s cameos are, as always, enjoyable and will bring a smile to your face every time you see his digitally wrinkled face on the screen. For the most part the writing is solid and characters are portrayed with the same personalities you expect them to have. Wolverine is tough while Spider-Man is snarky and sarcastic. A couple lines will leave you groaning, however, but at most they will end up being tomorrow’s Internet memes. The music is unremarkable and seems almost as if Marvel dipped into its vault of stock themes for epic battles, but luckily enough the crisp and clear sound effects more often than not drown it out. The graphics are also hit or miss, with playable characters and important NPCs rendered beautifully down to the minor details, but enemies and environments are more slapdash and uninspired. All in all, the presentation of the game is somewhere between being decently impressive and unfortunately disappointing.
So the game has some good points and it has some bad points, which once again adds up to a “decent” gaming experience … if it weren’t for all the bugs that is. The one thing that Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has by the bucketful is bugs, way more bugs than its predecessors ever had. You will accidentally walk through walls, get stuck in midair, freeze in place, or even lock the camera into positions that totally obscure your view of the action. Sometimes you can fix these bugs by hammering on the buttons or backtracking to an earlier part of the level, but other times you will simply be shit out of luck and will have to start the mission all over again. The game allows you to play online with friends, and when you do so the experience is pretty much lag-free, online lag-free that is. You won’t be eating slowdown from network latency issues, but you will at some points overload the graphics processor, which is annoying. This may be understandable on systems like the Wii, but I was playing the 360 version, and I even noticed massive slowdown happening on my friend’s PS3 copy. For these massive behemoths of processing power, there is simply no excuse for this other than poor coding. Oh, and don’t take my earlier statement to mean that this only happens in online campaigns. Single or local multiplayer games eat the slowdown just as hard.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a fun game, when it isn’t glitching, and is at least a rental for every comic book fan out there. Whether or not you should actually purchase this game comes down to how much tolerance you have for bugs. I purchased Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1, and got my money’s worth out of it. It had its upside and downside, but I have no buyer’s regret. Thus far, I have no buyer’s regret for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 either, but I can see the constant glitching possibly interfering with one’s enjoyment of this otherwise solid action RPG-style superhero beat-’em-up. As long as the glitches don’t annoy the fan base too much, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 will be the same thing that Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 was, a decent game that isn’t one of the best games of the year, but is memorable nonetheless.