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Marvel: Ultimate Alliance Review - PS3

Introduction

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance brings together many of the great Marvel superheroes in to one exciting adventure. Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil are on the brink of gaining immense power that could destroy the Universe and your specially selected team of four superheroes must stop them. You are part of an organisation called SHIELD, led by Nick Fury, and supported by the United Nations. Obviously, it’s your job to stop Dr. Doom.

This is a typical comic book plot where evil people are rampant and superheroes must step in and save the day. Although there are so many popular games and comics where this standard scenario - good versus evil - is used, every new story seems to have people captivated. There are so many classic marvel characters and your control over them is so fluid that Brett Ratner might enlist your help when the next X-Men movie is made!

Gameplay

After the game introduces the story though a series of cutscenes, and you’ve learnt some basic skills you then have the option to select a team of four Marvel superheroes. At this early stage of the game you have a limited amount of characters available but at every ‘SHIELD’ save point you can rearrange your team. In the end, you’ll be able to play as twenty different Marvel characters, and there are one hundred and forty Marvel Characters in the game. Keeping the same selection has its benefits as it allows your team to grow as a group, yet there are some great characters you unlock as you progress. Selecting a well-known line-up such as the Fantastic Four (that’s Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch and The Thing) will give you bonus upgrades. As you play the game, characters level up and points are given to them. You then have the ability to allocate points to specific skills or just allow the game to auto allocate them.

You only control one of the four characters in your team at any given time, with the others controlled by the computer to help you fight your enemies. A drop down menu can be accessed by pressing ‘L2’ that allows you to select the AI of all the 3 characters that are fighting alongside you. Swapping between controlling the four characters is a breeze because each is allocated to a direction on the d-pad. Each character has special powers that can be assigned to another drop down menu, which can be brought up at any time with the ‘R2’ button. This layout of menus and buttons is good for seamless team alterations on the fly.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is an old school hack and slash with super powers and a top down view. The controls are so easy that even a four year old could play. Pressing a combination of buttons produces combos (I know, crazy, right?), which sadly are the same regardless of which character you’re using. Most of the (continued next page)