After just a few weeks, and several sessions of gameplay I've finally finished Activision's Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I have to say, I have some very mixed feelings about this game. While there were times that I was definitely entertained there were almost as many times that I was frustrated with poor level design, weak team AI, and poor story progression.
The gameplay itself is relatively fine-tuned. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is similar in many ways to both of the X-Men Legends games - as a result it has the benefit of two previous iterations of its main game mechanics. Levels are extremely linear with almost no "wrong turns" to slow you down. Push forward, break everything, look for arrows and you'll accomplish the main tasks with very little resistance.
The majority of trouble you'll run into comes in two forms, the aforementioned weak team AI and mini-bosses. The former almost always preceded the latter for me. What I mean is, right before almost every mini-boss (in Act 2 and later) one of my three teammates would walk off a cliff, get stuck on a wall and clobbered, or otherwise leave me high and dry. The most common of these was almost always walking off a cliff, which as best I could tell was the result in small gaps along the edge of many levels. On one of the later levels, "Cityscape," I walked into a hole that was right in the center of what appeared to be flat, safe terrain.
One thing that should not be a problem for next-gen games is AI path finding.
The story itself also suffers from many small holes. S.H.E.I.L.D's Nick Fury has assembled a team of the world's greatest super heroes (really more like a mix of the greatest and the most recently in a film) to battle Doctor Doom and the newly re-formed Masters of Evil. The main plot is sound, at least as sound as you'd expect for a comic book based game. The various sub-stories falter though. At one point there appears to be a sub-plot surrounding the Black Widow and her potential betrayal of S.H.E.I.L.D. Out of the blue it vanishes though.
Let me start by saying that I'm not sure whether the sub-plot was simply dropped or whether I made a mistake preventing it from progressing. Occasional Weasel asks you to track down some information for him - usually he asks you which of two things is better. After you answer his question his dialogue breaks off - it just stops. Weasel presents his question at the start of an act and then doesn't really confirm you've done things right until the beginning of the next act. At the start of the fourth act he was completely gone and there was no more mention of his story. [There was an epilogue concerning the sub-plot but I'm still not sure that I successfully finished that portion of the game.]
Unfortunately this kind of thing happens with a lot of the secondary objectives and sub-stories in the game. The more drawn out goals usually have no concrete resolution and the short ones are usually excessively tedious. Hank Pym occasionally asks you to cross a room, or walk through a loading screen to another room, just to talk someone and return. These tasks are so annoying and repetitive that by the third act you'll be ignoring everything except the main game missions.
Yes, they're extremely tedious - but the developers went ahead and included a neat little feature to the game that kind of makes a payoff. At the end of the game you'll be shown the "time line" which you've built. You'll get a chance to see what the results of finding the Ultimate Nullifier were, or what saving the Skrull planet resulted in. It's a neat payoff for secondary objectives that we often pass up when trying to burn through a game.
As a few extra bonuses you'll also be greeted with a number of extras fit for any Marvel fanboy and fangirl. From functional items like costumes (which are upgradeable) and simulator missions, to collectible things like comic covers and concept art, you'll be happy with what you find. The voice acting - especially the audio over the credits - is entertaining and fun.
The story, as I said before, is a decent comic book tale. Villains are threatening the world and an elite[-ish] group of heroes has been assembled to save the day. There's a nice assortment of Marvels villains (mostly from the Avengers and Spider-Man stories) to mix it up with and their appearances are tied into the main storyline in an appropriate fashion. While battling Rhino in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance isn't as satisfying as in Ultimate Spider-Man it is memorable and challenging.
If I were to name the game's one major shortcoming it would be length. The game is certainly long - just not in a good way. While the story was engaging, and much of it occurs as part of gameplay as opposed to in cut scenes, the level design was repetitive. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is a beat-em-up at heart and like most of the genre it starts at point A and ends at point B. There's very little in-between.
Even having been spread over several weeks I was anxious for it to hurry up and end.
Because of the game's rich list of "training" missions (most culled from famous comic book stories) there's plenty of content available independent of the story. It begs you to ask, can some of the game be pulled from the main story and put into a training mission? While I enjoyed Galactus' inclusion in the main story, it almost made more sense to have him appear in a Final Four themed training romp.
Some of the current commercials for Marvel: Ultimate Alliance are making it look like a party game [see Destructoid], but the length of the title and the setup of the main story, really don't support this. I'm curious to see how the title plays on the Wii but on the 360 it's really more at title for dedicated gamers and comic fanatics.
Final Verdict: 75/100.
In an age where graphical power and "next-gen gameplay" garner the most hype, more and more companies are attempting to return to their roots as often as they innovate - and gamers love it. It seems like an illogical response. With more titles attempting to reach the highest level of graphical realism, and more consoles aiming at providing the highest level of hardware potential, why are we embracing old titles so quickly and enthusiastically?
