I Highly Recommend This Game (On Any Other Console)

My fiance and I preordered the Nintendo Wii from Gamestop. The system was bundled with several games and an extra controller. We kept all of the games except one, Madden 2007. Neither of us has been interested in any sports games since Ice Hockey on the NES. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was one of the games that we received and one of the ones we were most excited about (besides Zelda, of course). My fiance was especially excited because he is a huge comic book fan. We had seen commercials for the game and thought it looked fun, especially with the innovative Wii controls. I am still nauseous from playing...

THE STORY
The story for this game is engaging and interesting. I am not a fan of comics, so I think it is likely that the story will have widespread appeal for fans and non-fans alike. My fiance was a little more engrossed in it than I was. The plot is simple: a super-team of heroes is brought in by an organization called SHIELD to stop the evil guys. I don’t want to reveal too much because it ruins some of the fun. I thought the ending was decent. The only endings I consider “good” or “above average” are endings like the conclusion of the first Metroid game.

Graphics
The graphics are stunning. I wish the Wii had HD capability because it could look even better. The cut scenes look like a movie. The graphics during play are very good. The character models are proportionate. The uniforms are very detailed with impressive textures. The level graphics are also very impressive, with realistic shading and coloring. As nice as the environments are, it is important to note that they are destructible :-) The physics is average. Explosions are very comic like. I kind of wished a bubble appeared over the blast that says “BANG!” The animations are well done, but hard to see in the fray. I only noticed the animations when I was alone on screen. The top down view makes the graphics harder to see. I was impressed with the graphics every time I was able to see them clearly, so it was unfortunate that the characters and details were often too small to get a good look at during gameplay.

Audio
Voice acting is above average. The voices fit the characters well and sound convincing. It didn’t sound cheesy at all. The sound effects were also good, very realistic and balanced. The background noises didn’t overpower the noises of the fight. I found the one-liners from each character during fights to be amusing, but very repetitive.

Controls
This game requires both the Wii remote and the nunchuck, and can support up to four players. I have seen a trend in games for the Wii lately. If the game wasn’t designed specifically for the system, the controls are terrible. This case is no exception. The A button and the B trigger control a few attacks. Movement is controlled by the joystick on the nunchuk. The rest of the attacks are controlled by the movements of your hand. Flipping your wrist up, down, and side to side, all produce different attacks. I thought these motions were too similar to be effective. I wasn’t able to effectively find a distinction between the three motions during gameplay. When I meant to flip up, somehow I saw the character do the side to side move. Flip down was somehow flip up. I found myself just waving my arm around pressing buttons. During important battles, I must have looked like I was holding a bottle of Yoohoo, following the directions “shake well.” It doesn’t seem to be a problem with the remote itself, as the remote seems to respond fine while playing Wii Sports. It picks up the tiniest curve in my throw when I bowl. I don’t think this game interprets the signals from the remote properly. I found myself getting tired from waiving the remote so frantically, limiting how long I could play the game in one sitting. My arm is still a little sore from finishing the game last night.

Playable Characters
This game has tons of playable characters, each with their own stats and powers. Spiderman, Wolverine, Storm, Captain America, and Elektra are all playable, with tons of others and even more characters that can be unlocked. Each has several uniform options that can be unlocked including classic uniforms. My fiance enjoyed playing Wolverine. My favorite character to play ended up being Captain America. For some reason, I found him to be the easiest to control and do damage with. Most of melee attacks were powerful. For some reason, whenever I played Storm, I was completely ineffective. I could tell because at the end of each level, a score is tallied based on experience, damages, and other factors to determine who the team MVP was. Storm never made MVP.

Gameplay
If you have ever played X-MEN Legends (the first or second one), this game may seem very familiar. They play almost exactly alike. You have objectives to accomplish that follow the story line, with a few side missions that appear as flashback-like “classic” missions. The objectives are usually bite-sized tasks and you can expect to complete 8-12 before each important battle. You navigate a very confusing map, which appears ghosted over the corner of the screen, much like in the Legends games. Not much direction is given as far as navigating the map. It is just a white outline with a few icons for save points. An NPC may tell you to go to the “engine room” to stop the baddies from destroying the engines, but you have to figure out where the engine room is located. Rooms aren’t labeled on the map even after you have uncovered areas by passing through them.

Saving and changing your team occurs at the aforementioned points. These aren’t too far apart, although I would have preferred a few more. On average, I found myself playing 30 minutes to an hour between saves. This is a bit frustrating because I had to wait that long to change the characters in the team. Once you find a save point, you can go back to it at any time during the level to save or alter your team. A nice feature is that a new human player can join and take over a team member at any time during the game. It would be really annoying if this was dependent on finding a save point.

This is an RPG-type game. As you progress in the game, your characters gain new skills that you can improve with “skill points” as you level. You can pick up drops to enhance the stats of each of your costumes. Leveling occurs quickly in this game and there are plenty of characters to manage stats for. As each character acquired more skills, they became much more entertaining to play.

The game can be played with one to four players, in either arcade or cooperative mode. In arcade mode, you choose one character to control and are able to “continue” your character if you are defeated, by pressing the A button after a 15 second countdown. No quarters needed. In cooperative mode, you can play with up to a team of 4 NPCs and as few as 1 person controlling them. You choose a character that you will control and the others fight under control of the computer. If your character is defeated, you can control any another member of the team and must go to a save point to retrieve the defeated team member. At any time during coop play, you can switch characters using the directional pad on the remote.

The biggest problem I had with this game (even bigger than the control issues) is the camera control. The computer controls the camera in the most dizzying, inefficient way possible. We tried every option we could find and found no way to change the camera control. Picture a guy, hung by his feet from a moving ceiling fan, holding a camcorder as miniature people battle under him. That is what it looks like. The camera attempts to follow your characters, but ends up spinning around (full circles), even when you are standing still. I usually adapt to just about any camera angle, but spinning is where I draw the line. Often my character wasn’t even visible to me. When attempting to go up a ladder, the camera would spin around making climbing a ladder impossible. Movement was difficult since you have to continuously adjust the direction you are pushing the joystick as the camera spins. It was not only frustrating, it actually made me nauseous. We later obtained a copy of the game on the XBOX 360, and didn’t have the same problems with the camera. It was not the best design either, but the camera was not spinning on the other console. What a headache.

Price
The game cost $49.95, which is one of the more reasonable prices for the games on the next-gen consoles.

Overall Recommendation
For me, this game is teetering on the line between average and below average. The storyline is interesting, the graphics and audio impressive, and gameplay is fun, but it is hard to overlook the controls and the camera. If you have another console, I highly recommend getting it on that. It is a fun game, but the frustration it creates overshadows that in this version.