In Case You've Ever Wanted to be a Super Hero, Now You Can Be 23.

Mr_chelledun and I have spent a tremendous, embarrassing amount of time playing Ultimate Alliance since he received it from my mom for Christmas. This has been, of course, at the expense of little things like house cleaning, working out, and preparing food for ourselves. There’s always take-out pizza, right? Tonight we finally made it to a place where we have beat the game, and I am so relieved.

Game Story
That pesky Dr. Doom has formed Masters of Evil, a group consisting of pretty much every bad guy imaginable. S.H.I.E.L.D. steps up to deal with the threat and recruits the Marvel gang of heroes to help. Players head underwater, into Murder World fun house, over an ice covered mountain, to Dr. Doom’s lair, and more. By talking with various characters a variety of mandatory and optional missions are revealed and must be completed.

General Information
Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance allows players to take control of a total of 23 familiar characters. Some are available at the start, while others become unlocked later in play. Players may either use a one-player version with a team of three other heroes, a two player version with a team of two other heroes, or an arcade competitive mode with up to three other players and no heroes. As we delight in attempting to kick each other’s butts, mr_chelledun and I played primarily in arcade mode. One HUGE bonus of Ultimate Alliance is the ability to switch modes and the number of players within the same saved game, which allowed one of us to take a break at times while the other kept going.

This game calls itself an action RPG. I think calling itself an RPG is a little generous. A good chunk of puzzle-solving is required to complete the game, but most of the action is killing bad guys.

My mom purchased this game new at Kmart for $40.00. You can find it much cheaper used, or probably even new.

What I Liked
This game is really a blast. I love the huge arsenal of superheroes available, which includes Deadpool, Elektra, Mr. Fantastic, Spiderman, Storm, The Thing, Ms. Marvel, Human Torch, and Wolverine, among many others. I’m no Marvel comics scholar, but I recognized most of the heroes, villains, and other characters from movies. We enjoyed figuring out the strengths, weaknesses, and superpowers of the various characters. Originally we started out with The Thing and Wolverine, but after much experimentation I play almost exclusively as Storm while mr_chelledun primarily uses Ms. Marvel. Having a character who can fly is a huge advantage, and these two do so very well. Character choice is critical, as you can only switch back and forth at S.H.I.E.L.D. save points. Over time, you can develop your superhero’s various powers to include all sorts of nifty tricks and enhance or change their uniform to produce a veritable fighting machine. For this reason, it is best to find a character you like and stick with him or her to build up an arsenal.

You can learn the basics of playing Ultimate Alliance in about three minutes. Before playing this game, I had never even touched a Playstation 2, but I wash soon slashing away at bad guys like nobody’s business. By the time I mastered the basic skills, new super powers were unlocked and I was able to buy the ability to throw lightning bolts, sweep bad guys up into a tornado, and the like. This game actually has pretty decent replay value because the possibilities are endless with so many superheroes, each with distinct powers. I entertained myself for a good couple hours just going through and messing around with different characters to see which ones I liked best.

We completed the minimum requirements to get to the credits in an estimated twenty-five hours. Both mr_chelledun and I are relatively new at Playstation 2, so you will probably finish it quicker. I actually thought we would be done with the game the first day we got it, so I was pleased it had a lot of bang for the buck. We missed a couple of optional missions that we want to go back and complete, which you can still do after reaching the game’s end. I relly enjoyed the game end that we were able to watch upon beating the final boss. We received a view of the future, based on our success/failure in various specific missions. As it turned out, we did most things right but made a mistake that may or may not wipe out the entire mutant race. Oops. Better go back and fix that part.

What I Didn’t Like
There are only so many ways to beat up a bad guy. This game does feel repetitive, partly because some of the levels just go on too long. Particularly, I felt like we were stuck at Mandarin’s Palace for ten hours of my life. I was also pretty disappointed with the puzzles, which were easily completed by using whatever happened to be in the room. Arrows almost always point directly at the items you need, which are also marked clearly on a map. Ultimate Alliance is no Zelda, in other words.

Speaking of the map, we had some major glitches with it. Only Player 1 controls the map and it would often inexplicably slide off the screen, never to be seen until randomly ten minutes later. Wandering through endless identical corridors is bad enough, but with nothing to guide us it became unbearable.

Finally, the scenes in between play time were simply too long. These typically involved a group of super heroes receiving a briefing about the next mission, often several minutes long. Offered partly for explanatory purposes and partly (I think) to allow the next segment to load, these scenes became bathroom break time for us before too long. They can not be skipped and would probably become even more annoying upon playing the game for a second time.

Sights and Sounds
I’ll be completely honest – I’m basically comparing the graphics on Ultimate Alliance to PC and Super Nintendo games, as I have just moved up from these things. Of course that means that I think the graphics are pretty decent. You won’t feel like you’re actually there, but the visuals won’t detract from your playing experience either. The explanatory scenes between action segments look particularly nice. We did experience a few visual glitches where things sort of stalled or twitched, so I think the game has a bug or two.

Sound was very good for this game. Each character has a distinct voice and can be clearly understood. The soundtrack, of course, is irritatingly repetitive in some segments. The Murder World carnival music particularly drove me up the wall.

Overall…
Ultimate Alliance isn’t the most sophisticated game I’ve ever played, and I do feel like it rots my brain just a little. It is, however, fun and extremely addicting to take out a bunch of bad guys. If you like to beat stuff up under the pretext of a quest or two, Ultimate Alliance for Playstation 2 is for you.