Marvel Ultimate Alliance Review
By James Gorcesky
December 21, 2006

Greetings true believers, I know how odd it must seem to read material from your trusted reviewer who normally spends his time mottling on the idiocies of piece of crap movies and the exulted lure of cult horror films. But as a personal request from the Anarchist as he has heard the numerous amounts of hours and excitement that I have had on this game – we feel that all of the other fan boys and girls should experience this ultimate game play.
First off, I have Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance for the Xbox 360, I got it because it looked like the best graphics than the other game systems, and the more advance gaming systems (6th generation) such as 360 would offer you to play as Colossus and the King of the Jews himself, Moon Knight. If you have played the two previous X-Men Legends games, this is made by the same people. Except this is put onto a much larger Marvel epic crossover scale and has a long line of game play time.
Let me tell you a lil’ about this game – it is a MUST HAVE for all Marvel Marks. I grew up as a Marvel fan boy, although the advancements of comic book storytelling and character development have recently swayed me to the DC side. Unfortunately, DC has NEVER put out a fun, exciting or challenging game going all the way back to the NES days of the original Batman game that failed to promise us the Return of the Joker. Okay, getting lost on my tangent – this Marvel game lets you play as 20 or so Marvel characters (including the A list of Captain America, Spidey, Wolverine, Thor, Iron Man, The Thing, Deadpool, Daredevil all the way down to the second stringers that are still very fun to play as including Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, Luke Cage, Blade, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Spider Woman and Mr. Wakanda – The Black Panther.)
THE STORY: Doctor Doom has assembled a large cast of super villains in their own mock up of the Masters of Evil – (unfortunately the Red Skull wasn’t invited for this game). To retaliate all of the destruction and mayhem inflicted upon the Marvel Universe, Nick Fury – Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been delegated to create a super heroic task force. You start off playing as a team of four consisting of Wolverine, Captain America, Thor and Spider-Man – but once you complete your first mission by killing off the planet of Mulak IV’s very own Fing Fang Foom – you are allowed to create a task force of up to four players at one time from a stock of around 15 heroes. Of course, the more game play you have, you eventually unlock other heroes including: Ghost Rider (once you save him from Mephisto) Blade (once you save him from a Claw Game in Arcade’s Murderworld), Silver Surfer (once you stop Galactus from devouring the Skrull’s homeworld), Nick Fury (once you defeat the game on Easy) Daredevil (once you find the five missing Daredevil action figures hidden throughout the game), and The Black Panther (once you find the five missing Black Panther action figures hidden throughout the game.)
The game will take you to just about every land and aspect within the Marvel Universe. From the S.H.I.E.L.D Heli-carrier, to the depths of Atlantis, to Stark Tower, Mandarin’s Golden Valley, Dr. Strange’s Mystical Hall (BY THE EYE OF AGAMOTTO!), Arcade’s Murderworld, Mephisto’s Dimension, Asgard, the Inhuman’s moon base Attilan, help save the Shi’ar Empire, visit the Skrull’s homeworld and then all the way to Castle Von Doom itself in the mighty land of Latveria. Along your quest you will encounter around 120 supporting Marvel Universe characters to help, support, save, defeat or defend along the way. And I’m talking about some of the big major leaguers like Galactus, Loki, Super Skrull, Namor, Wong, Gladiator, M.O.D.O.K. to the miniscule supporting cast of the Universe like Jarvis the Bulter, Namorita, Attuma, Lockjaw and DUM DUM DUGAN OF THE HOWLIN’ COMMANDOES!
What’s cool about the game? Well, it’s like an RPG, but not anything like Kingdom Hearts of a Final Fantasy game. It’s a typical wandering around hack and slash, if you have ever played any of the Dungeons and Dragons games of Heroes and Baldur’s Gate – where you can have up to four people play at once, within the same screen in an aerial third person point of view. The disadvantage to that is that you always need to stay close together – and if you have a small screen on your tv – it becomes quite challenging. Some of my more favorite aspects of the game are the choices you make will effect your outcome in the ending movie. The entire game is filled of objectives that you must accomplish, but there are a lot of other side objectives that you need to take care of as well if you want to successfully save the entire Marvel Universe. For example, when my girlfriend Alison and I played the game, we couldn’t save Princess Lilandra of the Shi’ar Empire and she died. Once she dies, you don’t get a second chance – with that choice, we ended up not assisting in the Shi’ar empire because her sister Nightbird became the proper ruler, who didn’t alert the Earthlings when a large asteroid neared our planet and we lost about 1/3 of the continental United States when it crashed. ~ Sorry Oregon L
Another fun thing I love about the game is by customizing and powering up your heroes. Even teaming up certain heroes together has benefits, such as playing with all X-Men characters or the Fantastic Four – your whole team will reap the benefits of such things as health regeneration, +5% XP or various others. In typical RPG fashion, you equip your players with relics and abilities to make them stronger with their HP, XP and other stats. When you power up your characters to a certain level, you unlock their other costumes. Some costumes become entirely different appearance of the character, some of the costumes will turn you into a different era of the character and sometimes another costume will merely just give one version of your player’s different abilities that his/her other couldn’t provide. For example, you start off the game playing as the latest Ultimate Version of Thor. But the more you play, you will eventually unlock his costume/character variable to play as retro/classic Thor (with winged helmet and traditional Mjolnir in hand), Ruler of Asgard Thor (who is basically slightly different but more powerful and with a beard) or even Beta Ray Bill. There are a few other characters that you unlock which are considered variables of character’s costume, but the fan boys know that you can play as totally different people. Including: Scarlet Spider/Symbiote Spidey, War Machine/Iron Man, Ms. Marvel/War Bird, and white Nick Fury or black Nick Fury.
On top of all of the choices and interactions you get with the game, there are a lot of things you can unlock as well. Since I played this game on the Xbox, there was already a pre-determined list of things that I needed to unlock but there is a lot more. There are roughly twenty “comic book” missions that you can find throughout the game. They vary from individual training simulators for your core group of heroes and there are some where you can bring your whole team into the simulator to bring you characters up to par post haste. In particular, any simulator that happens on Asgard where you fight countless hordes of trolls will bring everyone’s XP up like crazy! You can also unlock concept art all throughout the game and take a peek into the creation of a comic book video game. ON TOP OF THAT, all of that worthless Marvel Geek knowledge of yours can be put to the test so that you can gain XP points for your team. Each level has a Marvel Trivia simulator that asks you around 50 common and bizarre multiple choice nerdy trivia questions. Be prepared to know that Toothgrinder and Toothgnasher are Thor’s twin rams who pull his chariot :D. Also for all of you retro gamer fans, take a dive back into the past by playing Breakout and Pitfall within Arcade’s Murderworld. Hell, you can even defeat acid spewing clowns with bumper cars – loads of fun.
Downsides? There are a few. The gaming is quite repetitive, you basically go from one room to the next and you and the team beat up bunches of bad guys. Sure you will encounter the basic little puzzle here and there on what to open, pull/push next – but for the most part – the game developers have put a little blue arrow above it – or it will be marked with a giant red “X” on your map. Some of the variables of the costumes are “slight” recolorings of a character module. I was hoping to get a really classic version of Iron Man in the game (such as when he looked like a walking Tin Can or at least the Mego Version of Iron Man). The Silver Surfer in particular has four different “costumes” but he looks like the same Norrin Radd each time. Also, playing the game live on Xbox is just playing the game with other people over the internet, but now instead you compete with your partners for the money, health, upgrades and XP. It isn’t all too challenging – but definitely entertaining. My girlfriend and I beat the game on Easy – and it speaks for itself. There was hardly a level that we had to redo or our whole team died. Chances were if we did die, it was because we fell off a cliff or into a bottomless pit. I am playing a “Normal” version of the game with my friend Mikey, with the only difference is your opponents will block more.
Overall, the game is lots of fun and addicting. I’m currently trying to still accomplish every little thing imaginable in the game by getting every costume for all of my characters. There is a separate entity of the game creating your own personalized “My Team” where you earn extra points utilizing team work. Working on powering up my own team is a whole new quest in itself. The movies within the game are BEAUTIFUL; someday I would love to see an entire animated CGI Marvel movie of this caliber. They give true credit to the comic artists of the past, but don’t allow the choppiness or pixilated versions of your heroes and villains that you’ve come to know and love over the years. There are a few little cut scenes here and there, that will show you character dialogue boxes like they were in the Silver Age when they would feature the character’s floating head near a caption box to tell you a story :D. Now, depending on what character you have on your team when there is a cut scene of dialogue, you can have differing conversations which can sometimes be quite entertaining. This is a definite game for any RPG fan or any comic book fan. Let’s just see what DC can dish out to compete with it.