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Back in 2006, comic book aficionados let out a celebratory squee with the release of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The game was the culmination of several past successes from Raven Software (X-Men Legends, X-Men Legends II) infused with the promise of playing as the entire Marvel Universe. And while impossible to cram everybody into the game, the original Ultimate Alliance took a real kitchen sink approach that made sure fans everywhere were satisified. Now, 3 years later, Ultimate Alliance is back. But with new deveoper Vicarious Visions at the helm, can Ultimate Alliance 2 repeat the series success, or does it suffer from an "under new management" crisis of quality?
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, contrary to everything you've read about and heard about, isn't Marvel Civil War. In fact, the big picture story is entirely original, with much of the body of the story borrowing from both Secret War and Civil War. The game begins with Nick Fury's secret invasion of Latveria, which inadvertantly leads to a strained public relationship with superheroes and sets the stage for the Superhero Registration Act. At this point the Civil War storyline loosely takes over. It's far better to refer to UA2 as "inspired by" Civil War than being about Civil War. So many key plot elements from the comics -- Peter Parker's crisis of faith, Captain America's death, the Fifty State Initiative -- none of these things are in the game. Instead a third, original story weaves everything together and provides some great twists and turns for comics fans who thought they might know what to expect.
As you might have expected, Ultimate Alliance 2 plays an awful lot like the three games that had come before it. Vicarious Visions has done a tremendous job retaining what makes this series great, and yet they've gone a few steps beyond this and remedied a lot of the problems we've had with this franchise since day one. Gone are the days of switching superheroes at pre-designnated checkpoints -- now you can modify your team on the fly whenever you feel like making a change. And those giant, meandering levels that seem to take hours to complete? Kiss those goodbye as well. Nothing in Ultimate Alliance 2 takes more than 40 or so minutes to power through. Once you do you'll be greeted with a change in scenery and a nice chunk of story to help move things along. All in all, Ultimate Alliance 2 is a much tighter package than anything that's come before it. If you've got a lengthy afternoon to kill, you'll be able to power through this one in about 8 hours. A far cry from the 20 or so hours I sunk into the original Ultimate Alliance.
While a lot of the changes introduced in Ultimate Alliance 2 were welcome changes, there were a few tweaks that just didn't sit well with us. The RPG elements kind of feel like someone has taken a scalpel to them. You'll no longer assign your boosts to individual heroes, but to your team as a whole. Alternate costumes that used to allow for all sorts of different skill tweaking are now cosmetic only. For the first time in four games, I found myself leaving the "auto-spend" feature switched on. There simply weren't enough choices in character customization for me to care. Maybe we were just spoiled with the past games, but taking so much from the character tweaking really hurt my little nerd heart.
The lack of alternate costumes was a sore spot for us too. The previous game featured 4 costumes per character (3 of which had to be unlocked). Here you'll only find 2. What's worse, these costumes aren't very good. Take Iceman for example: last time around you got four very distinct looks -- the classic blocky look, a spiky variation, a human variation, and the original snowball look from 1963. This time you get an extreme spiky look by default and unlock a variation where he kinda looks like a ice sculpture of The Fonz. Alternate costumes might not seem like an essential, but they're the carrot on the end of the stick for comic junkies such as myself. Still -- Vicarious Visions managed to hit a few of these out of the park. Gambit as Apocalypse's horseman of death, for example. Or Daredevil's Secret War outfit.
Vicarious Visions did more than just mess with a good thing -- they brought a bag of tricks that quickly made up for the few complaints we have with the game. The biggest of these is the introduction of "fusion" powers. In addition to the regular assortment of powers that each hero might have, each of them has a special move that they can do with another comrade-at-arms that can wipe the floor with whoever is on the screen. Each pairing of heroes is going to have a different fusion power. In other words, what Wolverine does with Daredevil isn't going to be the same thing that Wolverine does with The Thing. While that concievably leads to hundreds of possible combinations, each of these powers tends to fall under just a handful of types. Some will target a certain enemy, some will clear an area, some will require you to guide your paired-up engine of death -- that sort of thing. Despite the sameness of many of these combos, unleashing one always felt tremendously cool.
What really surprised us about the combat wasn't how much the fusion moves felt like one another, but how much the regular combat didn't. These games have always been prone to "big guy, ranged guy, melee guy" mentality, and while things haven't strayed too far from that formula I would have a hard time saying that any two characters felt alike. Are Wolverine and Captain America both great at close range? Absolutely. But their individual strengths and weaknesses meant they would play as totally different characters. It's something the series has always strived for, but we've never seen it pulled off as well as we have here.
A number of other improvements, from a closer camera in some scenes that helped to show off the stepped up graphics to some minor but pleasant adjustments to the co-op gameplay helped to round out a pretty much perfect sequel.
In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, Vicarious Visions has accomplished exactly what they set out to do. Yes, there are a lot of tweaks and changes between UA1 and UA2, and yes, not all of them are for the better. But Ultimate Alliance 2 is a hell of a good roller coaster ride for anyone whose enjoyed what's come before it in the series.
YAY! - A much tighter, faster, and prettier story all around. No two characters feel alike.
NAY! - Too many RPG tweaks stripped out of the game. Not enough costume changes.
For those of you who really hate reading, or only learned to read numbers: - 8/10
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The fact that you admit to using the "auto-spend" option just shows how much this sequel has dropped the ball. The story is incredibly lame and kind of a blatant rip-off from Halo: The Fold = The Flood. Also thanks to the story I couldn't play with two of my favorite characters at the same time; Iron Man and Captain America.
The controls and camera weren't as finely tune as the games before, the cut-scenes were pretty basic and dull and the extra stuff like the Simulator Missions and Intel backstorys were kind of beat. I am glad that they kept the trivia game though.
The game is more like 4/10 and has me wondering wasn't there suppose to be a game with Mr. Sinister as the main villian following "X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse"?