Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - Review
(for the Playstation 3)



I wrestled over giving this game 3 stars for a long time before deciding on four. The problem that it has, in a nutshell, is that it banks on fan service to provoke interest and maintain it. That means the interactions with well-known characters needs to be fantastical, over-the-top, and either at or beyond the level of ridiculousness that a marvel fan would come up with in their own superhero fan fiction or daydreaming.

And don't let my hesitation fool you, it definitely does do that. At a few points in the story all the heroes just collide in one place for a battle royale of sorts, where big name heroes are just showing up willy-nilly and you can swap out heroes on your team to have the exact multi-man deathmatches you've always wanted, you crazy person.

The dialogue also isn't anything but corny, but this is a Marvel game, and unless you're wolverine or deadpool then you're not going to find anything but cheese. The game does give you some simple dialogue trees for conversations with other heroes or villains, so you can at least pick the sort of cheese you want to spout (though, actually, the non-spoken lines are considerably better written than the spoken ones, which is a damn shame because those are the ones you have to listen to).

Since this game is about the hero registration civil war, you essentially have to pick a side and your alliances come with you for a big chunk of the game. This also means heroes on the other side of the act are locked out for that point, and some of my favourites actually became enemies at that point; this wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though, since having a five on one fight against iron man was more than enough to convince me that I was enjoying myself.

Each character has their own combos and special moves, but the big super moves are called fusion attacks, where you pick two of your team of 4 heroes and they do a duo attack that either targets one dude, targets all dudes in the surrounding area, or lets you run wild and vaguely aim at various dudes that you can manage to lay your eyes on in the alloted time limit. Since there are dozens of heroes this results in hundreds of mutant powers; although since they break into three groups and the attacks get same-y (I favoured storm and seeing an ice tornado, fire tornado, bomb tornado, lightning tornado with different fusion partners made me lose quite some interest), this isn't as varied as they probably want you to think it is. It really boils down to those three types and you get to the point of mixing your team up to try and get a good balance of raw power, fast movers and versatile fighters.

Either way you pick your favourite heroes, and if they end up on the other team then, well, sucks to be you but most heroes can be persuaded to either side so it's not so bad. I favoured storm, human torch and deadpool, with the fourth slot rotating between various people I felt like at the time (usually settled on wolverine). Everyone's powers work the way you expect them to in most cases, which makes some seem completely unfair when you first pick them up but then realize it all balances out in the end when you're fighting a twenty-story goliath.

So what's wrong with all this craziness? It's a beat-em-up game where you dispatch thousands of robots, either good ones or bad ones... and you fight bosses often enough. It gets same-y at the points between those boss battles, and unless you mix your team up (and the game rewards you for actually picking a winning combination and sticking to it) then it gets rather boring from one mutant fight to the next sometimes. Finally, though, the next crazy boss flips over a nearby railing (with an accompanying subtitle so you can't possibly miss him) talking smack, letting you jump right back into the mayhem.

Thankfully this happens often enough, and the story is fun enough with recognizable hero faces that you can't help but giggle at the proceedings. There are also plenty of "oh snap" moments in the cutscenes and even during fights that taking the game right through to the end is still fun and very worth it. If you even recognize two of the faces on the box, then you'll know a lot more in the actual game and it'll be a fun eight hours.