Video games based off popular Marvel and DC Super Heroes have always been kind of a Russian roulette of aweful. You never quite know if the game you are about to check out is a decent title, or if you are about to be lured into a van and molested by another Superman 64. Fortunately, with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 the chamber appears to be empty.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 follows, or at least tries to follow, both the “Secret War” and “Civil War” story lines. I say “tries” because about halfway into “Civil War”, Vicarious Visions decided that the original story was insufficient and needed to be changed.

To the dedicated comic book fan this may be an outrage, but the story they provide will be enough for a good portion of the population. The character writing is ultimately what ends up saving the story. It is clear that at this point in time, Vicarious Visions knows the characters they have written into the game. Deadpool is hilarious, Captain America loves his country, and Wolverine compensates for being Canadian. (Just kidding, Canada. You guys are great.)

This is especially useful since it sounds like the developers went to great lengths to make the voice acting sound as generic as possible. At some points, the only way you can tell who is even speaking is by listening for their distinct quips.

The game itself plays much like its predecessor, albeit with a few minor tweaks. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 rids itself of the horrendous item system, and instead replaces it with medals that you attach to your entire team. These medals are acquired by reaching milestones, finding them in levels, and accomplishing certain tasks in the game. They do everything from changing stats to increasing the number of fusion stars you can have queued up at the same time. While more of a novelty in the regular difficulties, equipping the correct medals on “legendary” can decide whether your characters live or die.

The special attacks are another aspect of the game that received an overhaul. Each pair of Super Heroes/Super Villains has a unique (or at least somewhat unique) attack giving you the possibility of over 200 fusion attacks. There are several different types of fusions to use against your enemies, each with a high score system that rewards the player with a health pack if used correctly. This makes learning to use the right type of attack at the right moment paramount. Use the wrong one a couple of times and you may find yourself restarting at a previous checkpoint.

My main complaint is the same one I had for the original. The face buttons simply seem backwards. There are many times, even after playing through the game twice, where I will hit the wrong button on the controller while both playing the game and attempting to navigate the menu. Why in the hell do you have to press “Y” to jump and “X” to access your character in the menu screen on the Xbox 360?

The presentation is where the game starts to fall apart. Aside from the button issues I mentioned previously, the game suffers from a number of rather annoying bugs. Players can get stuck in the environment, forcing everyone to spend the next few minutes trying to break the camera constraints in order to reset the player’s position.

The NPC’s that join you will sometimes break and refuse to activate whatever switches or buttons need to be activated so you can progress through the level. That happened to me on a number of occasions and the only way to fix it was to reload the level and hope it worked next time.

Even though the graphics are much improved over its predecessor, the graphical style chosen for the game is not the best suited for a brawler. Many of the levels are too dark, and following your character around the screen can become quite the task. There were a number of times where I completely lost track of where I was, so I would just mash on the attack button until my eyes could finish playing Where’s Spider-Waldo.

The poor camera placement certainly did not help either. The cameras are, for the most part static, and will occasionally attempt to pan across the scene to keep up with the players. This leads to rather awkward views, and can even end up in a position that keeps the players from seeing the action on the screen. To be fair, this has always been an issue with 3D brawlers, especially when the multiplayer element enters the picture.

Despite all of the game’s flaws, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a fun brawler and a great addition the series. It fixes a few of the issues that plagued the first game and most of the issues in this title could easily be fixed by a patch. If you were a fan of the previous title, I suggest you pick this up. If anything, give this game a rental. There’s enough there to keep you busy for a while, especially if you decide to play through both the pro-registration and anti-registration paths.

Tags: Captain America, Civil War, marvel, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Secret War, super hero, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.