Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

"A good game with some MAJOR flaws"

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was supposed to be everything X-Men Legends and Legends II wanted to be. I bought this game within days of its release, giddy with anticipation. While there is much to be liked about this game, I nevertheless found myself deducting major points for what I consider to be some pretty serious flaws, detailed below.

GRAPHICS - 8 out of 10
The graphics in M:UA are good, nothing spectacular. They seem to have paid more attention to the details of the characters than in X-Men Legends II. All of the heroes look good, no matter what outfit you've picked for them. The enemies look good without being too terribly repetitive.

SOUND - 6 out of 10
Nothing really to complain about here, but it seems to me that many of the sound effects were simply imported directly from the X-Men Legend games.

CONTROLS - 7 out of 10
The controls are laid out in a very similar fashion to the X-Men Legends games, so if you've played those games you'll be in familiar territory. The controls for using the Superpowers are a little different in that the Right trigger is used to call up the Powers menu, as opposed to the Left trigger in the older games. The Left trigger in M:UA is used to block incoming attacks, a nice feature but one I find I seldom use. Controls for combat are pretty much the same, too, with two buttons for attack (fast and strong), one to grapple and one to jump/fly. Overall, a solid control scheme without much of a learning curve.

GAMEPLAY - 6 out of 10
I confess I was torn about how to rate this one. On the one hand, playing the game itself is fun, more fun I'd wager than either X-Men Legends game. Taking out hoards of enemies with Captain America's shield or Iron Man's plasma discs is every bit the joyous entertainment it should be. However, in my opinion, the game loses fun points for a few major design flaws and what I consider to be a very serious bug. First, the flaws. When you start the game, each and every single hero available in the game is set--without asking the player--to automatically distribute skill points after each level up. This means that if you don't want the computer making stupid decisions and putting points into skills you don't want, you have to go through *every* hero and manually deselect this option at the beginning of the game. It took me a little while to figure this out and cost me much frustration. Next, while the costumes that each hero has add an interesting layer to the hero selection process, the use of costumes is not intuitive and I got no indication at all of how to unlock the higher level costumes (the first two unlocks are based on how many kills you've gotten while playing the hero and the last costume is unlocked when you complete that hero's special Comic Mission). Finally, unlike the X-men games, in M:UA you only gain a skill point *every other level*, meaning it takes longer to build up those butt-kicking skills you want so badly and makes it harder to perceive that you're making progress as you play the game.

Now to the bug. I don't know if anyone else has encountered this, but having started the game from the beginning several times and played through the first Act, I've observed that the game can be quite unreliable about awarding your heroes their well earned skill points when they level up. On more than one occasion I've had a team of four heroes level up at the same time to a level where they should all earn a new skill point, only to find that one or more them seems to have been ripped off, not getting the precious skill points needed to advance their powers while their comrades continue to gain in strength. If the character who got the shaft happens to be a character you really love, your anger will be doubled. (I almost threw the controller when I saw that Iron Man didn't get his skill point at level 10 while his teammates did. Iron Man is one of my two favorite characters in the game).

REPLAYABILITY - 4 out of 10
Because of my tolerance for the aforementioned flaws/bugs is pretty low, that seriously hurts the replay value of this game for me.

OVERALL - 6 out of 10
I want to say I love this game. There are things about it I do love, but I'd be curious to know if anybody has found a solution to the Stolen Skill Point problem I described above before I really devote myself to this game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/02/06