Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Photo gallery: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Ominous things are afoot right from the start in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Dr. Doom has brought together a coalition of supervillains under the Masters of Evil name, whose first act is to attack a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. An opposing coalition of superheroes quickly comes to the aid of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, who takes command of the situation and coordinates the superheroes as they continue to track Doom and his minions across the universe and into different dimensions.
 
Your starting lineup in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance consists of Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, and Wolverine, but after a few levels playing with these heroes, you're given the option to create your own custom team. At first you'll have about 18 different heroes to choose from, and they represent a good cross-section of high-profile heroes and more obscure fan favourites. Old-schoolers like the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and several X-Men are there, as are a number of heroes who are likely unknown to those who don't keep up with comics, such as Moon Knight, Luke Cage, Spider-Woman, and Deadpool. As you progress you'll run into other heroes such as Blade, Dr. Strange, Ghost Rider, and the Silver Surfer, who will in turn join the cause.

A massive array of Marvel heroes and villains can be found in the game.

Part of the fun of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is the sheer variety of places the game takes you. While the X-Men Legends games seemed stuck mostly in dungeonlike corridors and sewers and such, here you'll visit some of the most spectacular and mythical locations in the Marvel Universe, including Mephisto's Realm, Asgard, Mandarin's palace, the Skrull homeworld, and, finally, Dr. Doom's sinister Latverian castle. The lush environments really do look as if they came straight out of a comic book, and the game's overall look is enhanced with loads of dramatic lighting and crazy particle effects. The heroes and villains look good from afar, but up close they lack detail and have been bump-mapped to the point that they look like action figures.

The basics of the gameplay should be perfectly familiar by now to fans of hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers like Diablo, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, or Raven's own X-Men Legends games. Commanding a group of four superheroes, you'll fight your way through swarms of enemies, becoming more powerful and gaining new abilities and the occasional piece of gear along the way. From the get-go, everyone can perform a handful of straight-up melee combos with the A and B buttons. There are a few details that give the basic combat some depth beyond simple button mashing, such as the ability to disarm enemies and grapple with them and enemies that are only susceptible to specific attacks. Pulling the right trigger gives you access to a number of your hero's special powers, and these special powers, along with stuff like the ability of flight when appropriate, play a big part in giving each hero a unique feel. As different as the abilities can look and feel, most can be easily slotted into a handful of categories. There are melee attacks, radial attacks, projectile attacks, beam attacks, individual as well as team boosts, and high-powered "xtreme" attacks that you can only trigger after your usually slow-filling momentum metre reaches capacity. Save for the Silver Surfer, who seems stymied by the terranean nature of the gameplay, the heroes feel quite comparable to their ink-and-paper counterparts.

Though you have little control over how your hero's basic stats like health and energy increase as you reach new experience levels, with each new level you're given skill points that you can put toward special powers. Each hero has eight or more special powers in an arsenal, though many of them are inaccessible until you reach certain experience plateaus. You can also use cold, hard cash that you pick up by beating enemies and smashing crates to purchase points, though they start off pricey and become exponentially more so as you progress. Each hero also has three alternate costumes that you can unlock, which not only can drastically affect the hero's appearance, but also comes with a unique set of bonuses that you can pay to increase.
 
It would seem that there would be a bit of a conundrum in having an RPG-style experience system with such a huge cast of characters. You'd think that any hero who isn't constantly a part of your active team would become useless after the first level. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance addresses this smartly by artificially increasing the experience levels of non-active heroes as your active team progresses. Non-active heroes will usually be about one full experience level behind your active heroes, which is just enough that, should you choose to swap in a hero that you haven't used before, they'll still be tough enough to keep up. Perhaps most interesting about the whole hero customisation system in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is the fact that few of your choices are permanent. Though you can't take back any money spent, any skill points you've earned or purchased can be redistributed to different special powers at the drop of a hat. Additionally, if all of this talk of skill points and team boosts seems boring or confusing to you and you're just interested in beating up lots of bad guys, you'll love that the game handles all character customisation by default.

Some boss fights are intense and impressive.

The amount of crate and barrel smashing that you'll do in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is discouraging, but the game does a lot to keep the action interesting and varied. There are a few puzzles that you'll have to solve while simultaneously wailing on villains, though they have a tendency to alternate between painfully obvious and excessively obscured. There's no shortage of boss battles, the best of which incorporate Resident Evil 4-style real-time cutscenes that prompt you to press specific face buttons in order to successfully attack the enemy. The mechanics of these sequences are rarely difficult to pull off, but they make moments like your confrontation with Galactus satisfying and memorable.

You can play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance by yourself, allowing the computer to pick up the slack with the three heroes you're currently not controlling. You can instantly assume control of a different team member with the D pad, and holding the left trigger gives you access to some basic team behaviour controls. The artificial intelligence can generally hold its own, but it doesn't always listen to orders and can act a bit buggy at times. For a better experience, you can have other, real-life players take control at any point for some satisfying cooperative play, which holds true regardless of whether the other players are playing on the same system or over Xbox Live.

Even if you choose to ignore the numerous side missions that you'll be presented with along the way, it'll easily take you a good 15 or 20 hours to play through Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and it's a good ride from start to finish. The game gives you the sense that you can affect how the story ends by certain decisions you make, but these choices are usually pretty superficial, and not really worth playing through the entire game again for. The unlockable hard mode is much more attractive since you can import the buffed-up team you already beat the game with. There are also Xbox 360 achievement points to consider, most of which seem to flow quite naturally as you play the game, though there is a large number of secret achievements for you to suss out as well.