Throwing Down with Marvel Ultimate Alliance

By Paul Munn | March 13, 2007

The PlayStation 2 is home to some of the best dungeon crawlers. The Champions Of Norrath games from Sony Online Entertainment are at the top of the heap on the platform, with Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance right behind them. Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance had a much stronger story and better art style, but the online play in the Champions games put them on top of the hack-and-slash genre. Back before James made the jump to current-generation systems he would occasionally talk about how the other platforms just didn’t have a hack-and-slash game to sit down and tear through wave after wave of monsters, and they were poorer for it.

Well, now all of the consoles have a great dungeon crawler, and it doesn’t have a single health potion, mana potion, spell, or quest featuring killing rats. It’s an action-packed refinement of the dungeon crawler, but misses a couple of crucial features that keep it from taking the Best Dungeon Crawler crown from the Champions of Norrath games.

When I originally saw Marvel Ultimate Alliance and its predecessor X-Men Legends II described as dungeon crawlers, I didn’t really get it. They seemed more like beat-em-ups to me. When I played XML2 on my PSP I wasn’t really hooked either because of the subject matter. I wasn’t a big fan of the X-Men in my youth, so their stories and personal problems have only come to my attention in the form of the stories from the recent film trilogy. The XML2 gameplay on the handheld, while good, seemed very repetitive. Once I started playing MUA, however, I was hooked for a number reasons.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance solves the problem of XML2’s focus on the X-Men by having a wide and diverse cast of Marvel heroes to choose from for your team. You’ll find someone in the bunch to identify with and enjoy leveling up, from crowd-pleasers like Spider-Man and Wolverine to the Fantastic Four and less popular heroes like Elektra and Marvel Girl. Some versions of the game have a couple of different heroes that other versions lack, but the roster is almost all the same. Just be careful who you pick and who you play with. My choice of Iron Man apparently rubbed my comic-reading friend the wrong way given the recent Civil War comics, and when we played together he wanted to take Captain America for a spin for old times sake.

The story in MUA is noteworthy in that it is separate from any one hero or group of heroes, and weaves in and out of various bits of Marvel history. For example, in XML2 you would constantly be regaled with long speeches from Professor Xavier about the history of one thing or another, or you would have various X-Men squaring off verbally with their Brotherhood nemesis. The MUA story basically pulls all of the heroes in the roster together to fight a mass group of villains who have been convinced to work together — basically helping each other out just enough to get something good in return in the bargain — by Dr. Doom. In the process we get quick glimpses of backstory for various characters, but it’s not all mutant-this and mutant-that X-Men overload. We’ve seen and heard enough pontificating on how humans should be welcomed or dominated in the films already, thanks. This story focuses on super powered fights — it’s a team of super heroes against a team of super villains. Maybe the world hangs in the balance, but thankfully we don’t get to hear about it all the blasted time.

The visual style in the game is true to comic book form. The large environments are colorful, distinct from each other, and seem to load from disc without issue. These aren’t dungeons that all look alike — each of the multiple parts of the five large Acts of the game look pretty different from each other. The comic style extends very well to the characters and their animations. The character animations and how each hero fights differs based on who they are and the nature of their abilities, and both the sound effects and visual effects for their super powers are excellent. Some are faster, some are slower, but generally they balance out pretty well.

The comic-book-styled brawling is simply great fun and for me is a step up from the combat in XML2. It might be that playing it on the big screen is just easier for me than playing it on the PSP, but the fighting definitely seems more fun and the use of grabs and throws takes the fighting system over the top. One button push will grab onto normal-sized enemies, and you can then punch them or slam them by using the regular or heavy attacks. Once you grab them you can also push the analog stick to *throw* them, which makes for a great way to fling henchmen out of the way while you concentrate on the bigger fish. My favorite tactic is to throw down an enemy and take advantage of the extra damage that is done when you pummel them while they’re down. Throws have an extra bit of flair as well — throw ahead of you and you shove them down onto their back, smacking into walls or destructible objects. Throw them behind you and you are shown flipping onto your back and kick them over your head. It’s well-done comic book brawling goodness.

The game has no magic spells, replacing them with super powers. For the melee-heavy heroes like Wolverine this can be your temporary boost of damage, leaping slashes, and more. For the ranged fighters like your neighborhood spider-man, this can mean firing web bullets at your enemy. The good old blue mana meter is here, but it’s called energy.

The fighting is fast-paced, and while you’ll hear heroes complain that they’re low on health or energy in various ways, there aren’t buttons to push to hit a health potion or an energy potion. There aren’t any potions at all, in fact. Defeating enemies or breaking open destructible items around you will emit glowing energy or health orbs that automatically float to the nearest character that needs them. So if you’re locked in a tough boss fight, look for that lesser minion trundling about and making trouble and try to take him out to get a minor recharge. This puts the emphasis on action and fighting performance and not on hoarding potions to use up against stupendously difficult foes. If you go in with pretty high health all around, you basically know that you should be able to fight your way out of any situation with a combination of powers and fisticuffs. You won’t need to jump back to a shop and buy health and mana potions, and you won’t feel hamstrung by not being able to carry enough of them around.

Which leads me to my next point: with superpowers and brawling being your instruments of destruction, there is no shop. There is currency, but you don’t spend it on weaponry, armor, or magic items per se. You spend it on stat and skill upgrades, and on unlocking items. There are special items you can pick up along the way that will modify your abilities, with one item equippable per hero, and you can sell those items you don’t want for currency, but this game has gotten rid of the twin momentum-killers of having to stop and sell off old equipment and hunting through the shops for better equipment. Until this game I’d taken for granted that the shop and having to juggle all the loot was an essential part of any dungeon crawler, but once it’s taken out the action keeps going at a very good clip, deaths notwithstanding.

Death is handled rather nicely and in the Marvel way just means your character is knocked out. They hit the floor and you immediately take over another one in the party. After about five minutes you can revive your knocked-out teammates at any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. points at no cost, so you are inconvenienced but not penalized outright.

The icing on the cake includes very good voice talent. There’s very little wince-worthy spoken dialogue in the game, showing that Activision and Raven spent good money to bring in good voice talent to keep the mood and tone at just the right pitch.

Just as in XML2, there are many unlockables to discover in the levels and to buy using the currency I mentioned earlier, and character development can be as automatic or manual as you want. You can choose where every ability point goes, or let the game automatically apply them for you. Inventory can likewise be automatically applied, but given how streamlined it is I tend to carefully look over each item that comes in and the stats it confers on each hero.

These are all great things, so why doesn’t it take the crown from Champions: Return To Arms (RTA)? It has to do with online play.

In RTA, as in other dungeon crawlers, you play a single character with inventory, gold, and spells. When you want to play online, you can load up your offline game save and others will join in with their characters. When you want to join someone else’s online game, you can import a character from any offline game save, and while you’re playing online you can save the online game with your character in it to a new slot. Once you’re done playing online, you can load your old offline save, import the character from your last online game, and continue with your own offline story with the loot and experience points you earned online. It’s a little bit clunky, but it works pretty well.

In MUA, you are playing a team of four heroes with one shared currency, and you can swap in heroes from the roster back at headquarters at will. When you want to play online, you can either host with your save game, or you can join someone else’s save game and play one of their superheroes. You can save the other person’s hosted game if you want, giving you a copy of their superheroes’ progress, and you can save a copy of your hosted online game, letting others help you through a difficult spot.

The distinction between the two should be pretty clear at this point. You can’t take heroes from one save game and merge them into another one. This keeps you from importing a single hero for you to play into the online game, leveling them up, and then bringing just that hero back into your save game so you can enjoy the benefits of that play time with your own saved game. This, to me, keeps it from taking the crown from Return To Arms.

I still highly recommend the game as an example of streamlined, refined dungeon crawling gameplay with excellent graphics, a good story, fun comic book heroes and environments, and strong online play even if the objectives can be a bit vague at times, leading you to wonder just where to go next. I’ve read that the PSP version has microphone support, and the 360 version obviously has Live voice support, so those versions should be even more fun than the Wii version (which lacks online play entirely) and the PS3 and PS2 versions which lack voice chat support. Give it a rent, at least, and let us know what you think.

Links:
The official game site, which houses the original image.
The official sub-site at Activision.