Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

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I typically am a FPS guy, but I LOVE MARVEL. One of my favorite games of this generation is MUA. I've played through it about 6 times and unlocked and collected every possible item. MUA had tremendous variety as it followed a story created specifically for the game that allowed to introduce a hodge podge of characters in different locals.I had super high expectations for MUA2. I can't say that I'm dissapointed, but I don't think it's as good as it's predecessor.

I'll start with the presentation. The characters look great. The specialty "fusion" moves also look awesome and allow for some moments that will remind you of battles straight out of the comics. The environments on the other hand are really bland. The nature of the game, a level grinder, means you have to see a lot of the same enemies. MUA had you traversing all over the Marvel universe, so each level had a fresh look. You can't really plan on battles in space when most of the story takes place in an urban environment. The cut scenes are okay. Some are terrible, some are pretty cool, nothing on par with Square Enix to drop your jaw.

The gameplay is similar to MUA with the exception of the commands and fusion moves. You can no longer direct your heroes into battle, which means they do a lot of following you around. I can't remember a teamate disabling a shield or taking the initiative to attack enemies that were surrounding me. At times they were practically useless. I played through twice, once on casual (easy) with my yongest son and once on difficult. On the higher difficulty level, there were times I wanted to chuck my controller because the teamates stood around and watched me die. Another new touch that I like is being able to swap squadmembers on the fly. As long as they are not dead, you can switch out, so if you really want Storm and Iceman's fusion for a paticular level, put them in. If heavy hitters are working, grab Luke Cage and Thing. Several characters are locked throughout depending on wich side you choose, so playing through twice is a must. That really adds to the replay value because you do get some differnt boss battle and looks at the levels.

I didn't play online, but I did play with 3 players at home. Although it was easier having human teamates, there are times where it is nearly impossible to tell where your character is. Perhaps the game deserves credit for truly epic battles, but some of the boss battles are very dissorienting. The camera also doesn't pan far enough back and will warp you, a la Nightcrawler, to your squad. Unfortunately it will leave you open to attack or move you away from a supervillian you may have been attacking. Very frustrating.

I was also dissapointed in the unlockables. The number of characters is smaller. The are fewer costumes to unlock and they are purely cosmetic this time around. I've read the articles on IGN regarding the mountains of NPC's in the game (Non Playable Characters). In MUA, if you ran into someone, chances were pretty good that you were going not just going to play them, but unlock and upgrading two or more costumes with differnt abilities. Not so this time around. Obviously there are plans for downloadable content. The great thing about MUA2 is that it is REALLY fun. If Activision decides to release episodic DLC, MUA2 could have a long life span. Who wouldn't want to play Secret Invasion or World War Hulk? The game engine is there to make it happen. If it ends up being ten or fifteen dollars for a costume pack or three bucks for a new character, MUA2 will find its way to the shelf.

Ultimately, MUA2 is missing the variety, upgrading and customization of MUA. It feels like it took a step back away from RPG territory and more into brawler territory. It is a lot of fun to play, if not more stripped down. The DLC will end up being the key to how good MUA2 ends up being.

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The Ultimate Alliance games are basically extensions of X-Men Legends, with a four-character team going through an action-RPG hybrid.

I had been ambivalent about the first X-Men Legends, but I also thought that X-Men Legends II all but perfected the formula. So it was with high hopes that I put the Ultimate Alliance 2 game disc into my PS3.

At first, I was quite disappointed. The learning curve seemed unusually steep for me, even though I had played through X-Men Legends II about a hundred times. Gradually, over two days, the game started to feel more fun and I completed the Advanced (normal) difficulty.

And then the stink bomb dropped.

The worst part is, just like X-Men Legends II, this game actually has ample charms. Too bad it takes away most of the enjoyment with the major problems it lobs at you.

Pros:

Terrific character diversity. Characters' attacks are varied and have great personality.

The Navigation button, which you can use at most points in the game to point you to the right direction on where you're supposed to go next, and what the next objective is. Every game should have one.

The story is actually pretty interesting, though the overlong and unskippable movie files are irritating.

The two alternate storylines are a good idea.

Some innovative touches -such as "Attitude" in conversations, the "Audio" files that you can activate in a map -add to the vibe.

Having different "Fusion" attacks (co-operative super moves among characters) is great. If only they weren't so underpowered. See below.

Cons:

Extraordinarily dumb game interfaces. For example, the X-Men Legends games wisely arranged your characters in a cross pattern, because it matches your D-pad shape. Now, they arrange your characters in a straight row, and in a bizarre order (Up, Right, Left, Down) so that every time you switch characters, you're confused to no end. Or, take the Team Selection menu. It's not alphabetical, it's not by category (eg. X-Men together, Avengers together), it's not by anything, so that you have to look extra hard to find the character you actually want. Who the hell decided on this? The screen for choosing your boosts is also nonsensical; you could spend five full minutes looking for the boost you just picked up, and you won't find it.

Many unskippable "cut scenes". More and more games do this, and it's annoying as all out, especially when replaying harder missions. You have to wait a full minute for endless dialogue yapping just to get to your actual game. Video games aren't to be *watched*. They're to be *played*.

Horrible save system. When you hit "Save", it doesn't actually save your game -it saves up until your last checkpoint, which could have been 15 minutes ago. Don't tell me it's saving when it's not! Also, before extremely hard boss fights like Tinkerer in the Repeater Tower, it doesn't give you the option to save. So if you lose that fight, you have to go through the 25 minutes of arduous plowing through endless enemies. A great way to make the player give up the game rather than play on...off I go to the second-hand bin.

The "Legendary" (hard) difficulty level is inhuman. Consider this: Even mid-bosses (of which there can be 40 in one map) can take 45 per cent of your life bar with one hit. X-Men Legends II also had very high-damaged enemies, but X-Men Legends II had a healing system with Scarlet Witch's party-healing boost, plus 40 healing tokens you can store. Guess how many healing items you can store in Ultimate Alliance 2? TWO. That's right, you could use a healing icon, get hit by a mid-boss, and it'd be like you never used it at all. This game's alternate healing method is retch-inducingly useless. You're supposed to be able to collect "red orbs" which heal you, but the problem is, you get them by breaking environment objects -and in boss battles, there usually are none. This means in a boss battle, you can only afford to get hit only about eight times with your four characters. Two hits will kill a character, and there's no way to heal them back up. The "superheroes" in your team should be renamed "superwimps". Hell, three hits from an ordinary soldier enemy will kill you, yet you have to spend your superpowers a few thousand times in every map.

The enemies' AI is supra-genius, while your teammates act like kindergarten children. Another reviewer said it well, "Your teammates just sit and watch you die." Even worse, more often they crowd around a super-powered boss, gleefully eating all of the boss' most powerful attacks. While computer-controlled teammates don't take as much damage, this means that if your character is dying and you have to switch, you'll find yourself immediately next to the boss and it's most likely you'll lose 85 per cent of your life bar before you can even get away. And this game fills the screen with so much garbage that you can't tell where you are most of the time. Once again, Ultimate Alliance 2 breaks a feature that had been nearly perfect in X-Men Legends II -the ability to assign AI combat tactics (such as aggressive vs. conservative, close combat vs. long-range combat, using beam weapons rather than fists) to computer-controlled allies, which had prevented Cyclops from trying to feebly kick his enemies rather than use his optic blasts. In this game, a computer-controlled Jean Grey will just go toe-to-toe in melee combat against a boss character, when she should be throwing firestorms that do 12 times the damage. This is just an insult to the player. Shame on you, Activision.

The camera sweeps from angle to angle, ignoring your frantic efforts to control it with the right stick. And when an enemy is to the bottom of the screen, your visibility is about one step ahead of you. I can't tell you how many times I'm fighting a boss, playing the run-and-gun game, only to have the camera zoom into a useless extreme close-up of my character, so that when I do the evade move, I roll right on top of the boss who is waiting offscreen. Two hits, boom, you're dead! Just why Ultimate Alliance 2 decided to break this feature so badly is incomprehensible to me, because X-Men Legends II had a fluid camera that you can control, so that you never lose track of where you are. Killing a player by mucking with the camera is utterly unacceptable, in any circumstance. What's next, making all enemies invisible? Making the entire game screen black for the entire game? Think how challenging that would be!

This one infuriates me the most, because X-Men Legends II did it so right, but Ultimate Alliance 2 completely ruins it. After completing the normal difficulty, and training up your characters, the game informs you that you have to play the Legendary difficulty from the beginning -otherwise all your unlocked features, character building and abilities, boosts etc. are all flushed down the toilet. And I've already mentioned, the Legendary difficulty turns all your "superheroes" into "superinsects", with enemies that can kill you with three hits, ignore your attacks while rushing at you *and* firing projectiles, and can take about 100 hits of your powers before they die. And don't forget, you have to fight the camera -if you evade a lot, you could end up in a camera angle where you have maybe an inch of visibility all around you, so you can't aim at the boss, but s/he can rush right in your face and mash you to a pulp in two seconds flat. In Legendary difficulty, my Level 60 character actually feels worse than my Level 1 characters when playing in the Advanced (normal) difficulty. Which obliterates the enjoyment of levelling up your characters -if the only way to level up your characters is by fighting enemies 100 times more powerful than you, then what's the point of levelling them up?

And the ghost of X-Men Legends past continues to haunt the player. Players of the X-Men Legends games will remember that those two games had this bad bug where if you advance in the games far enough, sooner or later you hit upon these irrecoverable game freezes that nothing short of a hard reset will cure. Half a decade after the first X-Men Legends, it absolutely boggles the mind to see that Activision *still* hasn't fixed this issue. And it's not caused by the same thing as X-Men Legends 2, since Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn't have random item drops. I've spent over 30 hours building up the "Heroic Deeds" and unlockables of Ultimate Alliance 2, and now the game freezes at least once per play. It is further evidence that Activision is more concerned about appearances than quality control.

I can't imagine what had possessed Activision to break this game so horribly. Even more saddening is that, given the number of good points that *do* exist in the game, this could have been an enjoyable game. Instead, chuck another game into the "too hard to play, blood-pressure-increasing" pile.

Buy Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Now

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was a fantastic game. It managed to pull characters from the breadth of the Marvel (and technically the Ultimate Marvel) universe together for an epic adventure which took place in its own history and world. You didn't have to be a comic fan to appreciate the game, but it helped, and the controls were simple. The worst part of the game, arguably, was that specific costumes you might want your characters to wear gave bonuses you didn't want, or that the power sets were too broad.

I was excited for M:UA2, despite the fact that it takes one of the hands-down worst storylines of Marvel as its template for action, despite having an epic lead-in to a cosmic mash-up following the previous game. So, instead of having a potentially cosmic and epic issue, instead you have a game predicated entirely around the "reality" of superheroics and almost nonsensical choices given the history of a comic-book universe.

In almost every way, I found this game to be inferior to the previous one, though there are areas which would arguably be easier for players to handle. Let me go through the points quickly.

1) Storyline is hit-or-miss depending on your preferences. After the epic scale of the previous game, this one was at least a little disappointing. In the previous game, you went across the Universe and into Asgard, home of the Gods. In this one, you get to go to New York and ... um ... a Prison which could've actually been anywhere aside from the Negative Zone (where it's located) because you don't see anything but a boring prison interior.

2) Hero selection is generally common-fare. You get most people's favorites, and some key storyline characters (arguably) like Penance and Songbird. Frankly, for all the storyline good they did me, I would've rather had Hawkeye, Cyclops, Magneto, Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, or Moon Knight ... and if you're looking for the awesome costume array from the first one, too bad, each character only gets one, and arguably, not a single alternate favorite in the bunch (i.e. no Black-Suit Spidey, no Grey Hulk, no War Machine or Ultimate Iron Man not even the Silver IM Movie suit, but a clunky-looking version of his classic armor.) Also, unlike M:UA, it doesn't matter who you pick, you don't get to select and customize your teams like in the previous version (spending experience to improve their teamwork and collective bonuses), but rather get "medals" which can be next-to-useless (Ooh, +10% fire damage ... that's great for the Torch and ... ummm ... why am I spending one slot for that?)

3) Power selection is simplified. I actually applaud this somewhat, as it puts some basic powers in easy reach at the start, something that M:UA didn't always do. However, each character only gets 4 powers, meaning that you have much less customization ability. This isn't a bad thing for most players, but it makes managing your own powers relatively pointless. Since you get XP so easily in this game, and only 4 powers, just let the computer level you and worry about hitting the "X" button 1000 times.

4) AI. The Boss Fights in M:UA and M:UA2 are both pretty rough, considering some of the second-stringers you're dealing with. I don't care how powerful you claim Electro's become, when faced with Spider-Man, Iron Man, Cap and Wolverine, he's got about as much lifespan as a candle in a monsoon. But that's par for the course in these games. What makes it worse is that the dumbed-down AI of M:UA (from X-Men legends where you can actually make people hang back) where you need to direct your forces with general commands is turned utterly stupid. You no longer have control of your allies, but rather they run straight into high-damage boss attacks or groups of foes where they get torn apart. While a greater abundance of healing in this over the previous game mitigates that somewhat, it's still frustrating to find your allies unconscious simply because you didn't stupidly charge with the rest of them.

5) Cutscenes. In M:UA you were treated to epic cutscenes like an over-powered Doom defeating heroes and reshaping the world, Loki attacking Asgard with mutated berserkers, and Nightcrawler's heroic fight in Castle Doom. In M:UA2 you get to watch high-contrast static images as if you were watching a cheaply-done news report and heroes picking up trash after a battle. Wow.

In all, M:UA2 is probably better to get if it's your first time playing an Ultimate Alliance game. It does all the basics and has slightly more interactivity, but the world seems smaller, gritter and less heroic. If you've already played M:UA, you're not missing anything by skipping this except the chance for plaing a few new faces (like Gambit and Juggernaut.) If you want a real epic hero experience, get M:UA and let M:UA2 pass you by.

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I enjoyed the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance, not because it was an exceptional game (it's not) or because it had cutting edge visuals and sound (it doesn't)...I liked it because it was a chance to play as all my favorite Marvel superheroes in a pretty original gameplay style. Then comes MUA 2. The graphics really haven't improved much, and aside from a slightly different story line not much has changed. I did appreciate the ability to choose registration/anti-registration sides at first, but even this doesn't do enough to differentiate from the first game. I know these programmers have a formula that worked for them with the original, and that they don't want to mess with it too much. However, I feel they could have done a lot more with the PS3's capabilities without alienating the people who loved the first MUA. I'll be stepping down from my soapbox now.

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This review may appear late in relation to the game's release date. After all, I received the game as a Christmas gift... and what an awesome gift it was!!! If you are not a fan, or not a current follower, of Marvel Comics then I strongly urge you to read no further and to not buy the game. You may be confused and disappointed. For those who arethis game is for you!

The game is directly based off of the Marvel Comics series "Civil War", in which the Marvel Universe is split in two over the forced registration of all mutants (non-heroic and the like). This puts X-man against X-man, brother against sister, even villians against villians. For those of you familiar with the comic book series, the game follows the storyline beat for beat. If feels as if you are playing the very pages from the comic. There are scenes in the video game that are taken right out of the story. The game designers did a fantastic job re-creating the pages and allowing the fans to play them out in the game.

This is one reason I gave the game 5 starsgame play. It gives the fans the opportunity to experience something we've all dreamed aboutplaying the characters from an epic storyline and feel the action for themselves. As I mentioned before it follows the comic book mini-series to a "T" and the graphics are amazing! The cut scenes and in-game play are flawlessly integrated. There are some improved issues with the camera angles and I didn't feel so claustrophobic while playing like I did in the first one. However, like the first Marvel Alliance, players can be confused which is which when playing multi-player during epic battle scenes. Other than that, it is great.

Another reason it gets a 5 star is for the graphics. They are stunning, and so is the character design. Granted the playable characters are limited, the ones that are playable definitely make up for it. People have complained about the limit of playable characters, but don't be fooled. The game is awesome and the ones you do play don't disappoint.

I hope this review has helped. Like I said, this game is meant for the die hard Marvel fans, but your avid comic book reader shouldn't be let down either.