Summary [5.5 out of 10]

A sequel to the 2006 original, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 offers up a hybrid Secret War/Civil War storyline and the same four character, top down beat-em-up action found in the first game and the X-men Legends titles before it. Vicarious Visions left the basic game play alone and streamlined the interface to attempt to fix the few issues the previous game had. Sadly, this attempt failed and a decent chunk of enjoyment was streamlined instead. Add to that a host of bugs and technical issues and you have a title that should have been a sure thing turns into a fumbling attempt at home plate before you’ve  even bought the girl dinner.

Introduction

I really loved the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I didn’t really get into X-men Legends mostly because I got frustrated by the terrible teammate AI, but everything the X-men games bungled, Ultimate Alliance did well. It had a great story, branching endings, varied characters, a wide variety of stages, tons of unlockables, and a preponderance of awesome goodies for fans of Marvel comics. It was just loaded with content and I played it over and over to find everything and use everyone I could. It wasn’t perfect. The User Interface(UI) wasn’t great and leveling could be tedious. The item collection was a cool idea but got confusing and bothersome to keep up with. Overall though, the game was awesome.

So by all rights MUA2 should have killed. Word was the UI was fixed and everything would be smoother and more user friendly. Somewhere along the line, and I think it was at that part in the line where the developers look at the calendar and realize they are running out of time fast, things went really wrong.  They didn’t really monkey with the core gameplay terribly much aside from adding Fusion powers which allows two characters to use their powers in conjunction with each other for a more devastating special move. That is pretty cool and is a neat addition, although it paves the way for some frustration but I will get to that later.

Where the developers really went wrong here is that there was a lot of half-assing going on. They tried to fix the item issue with boosts, but those are just as annoying and tedious as the items were. They tried to streamline the UI but managed to make things even more frustrating on one level and feel incomplete on the other. Also they forgot to make it very fun.

The Great

• Deadpool:  If Deadpool hadn’t been in this game I would have probably stopped playing pretty early on. He is funny in his quips in-game and his discussions with other characters are amusing and on point with the character. His moves and powers are awesome and his healing factor means he can stay in the game a lot better than a lot of the other characters. Even other characters with healing factors don’t pan out as well, like Wolverine some how manages to go down for the count quicker than anyone reading this would against Mike Tyson. This game is the best evidence I could give that Deadpool needs his own game and it needs not to suck.

The Good

• Gameplay: The core gameplay mechanics work pretty well. If you love running around beating things up with a sprinkle of cool visual effects, you are generally in good hands here.

• Graphics: The visuals are mostly good. There are times when it looks REALLY good and other times, not so much. Some of the cut scenes are iffy but generally the graphics are good.

• Character Interaction: They could have done more with the branching conversations like Mass Effect, but the conversations with other characters are cool and change depending on who you are using and who you are talking to. Spider-man talking to the Green Goblin is great and is one of the ‘Key Conversations’ which will net you an achievement or trophy if you get 10 of them. There is some cool comic background stuff that happens here without getting to be too inside baseball and it is a nice addition. This isn’t much different than the first game aside from being able to be aggressive, defensive or diplomatic but in this game keeping things the same is a definite plus.

• Trivia: The trivia game is cool and adds a bit of a time crunch in for you. You can compete against other players if you aren’t alone and it becomes a bit like You Don’t Know Jack: Marvel Comics without Buzz or Cookie making wisecracks. I am a comics geek so I dig the trivia. The game pretty much supplies all the answers to these questions if you pay attention during loading screens and, well, the game.

• Multi-player: Like the first one, MUA2 supports both local and online multi-player. This REALLY makes the game more fun. Four people can play at once and having other people control your characters rather than the game’s AI is always better. Not only can you do more and do it better with real people actually making good choices, but you have someone to talk to when things get repetitive or a boss fight takes 20 minutes for no apparent reason whatsoever.

• Roster of Characters: The game features a lot of characters to play and interact with and not all of them are the mainstream sort you would normally find in a game like this. Like the first one, this game makes the most out of its license and it is really cool to see video game representations of characters I never thought I would see in a game. It would be nice if there were more that were playable but it was good to just get to see so many of them around. If you are a Marvel comics fan you will probably not be disappointed with the characters here.

• Cut Scenes: While some of the graphics can be iffy, the cut scenes are generally pretty cool, particularly the ones that show key moments from the Civil War comics. Captain America jumping out of a heli-carrier window and commandeering a jet looks just about as cool in motion as I thought it would and seeing Nitro blow Stamford to hell was pretty awesome. This reinforces my belief that they should make an animated movie of Civil War.

The Bad

• The Bugs: First and foremost, the bugs are the downfall of this game. I have a lot of complaints but this was the big one. I am not sure how this thing got out of beta testing let alone finding its way to store shelves. This thing is buggier than a new Microsoft Operating System. For one thing, you can’t turn the auto-leveling feature off without turning it off and taking away a point from something and then putting it back. Otherwise, it will just turn itself back on every time you leave the menu. That is just annoying, but some of the other bugs are worse. Like when I did a guided Fusion with Wolverine and Spider-man that, when it ended,  melded them together like conjoined twins if one of the twins rode on the other’s back while flashing in and out of existence.Or the one at the end of the Wakanda level where the Green Goblin disappears and you just keep fighting a steady stream of bad guys forever. I went for an hour and leveled up something like six times. I eventually looked it up online to make sure it was a glitch. Sure it seemed obvious but I couldn’t imagine such a big problem making it to retail. It did. You have to turn your system off and back on to fix this. Sometimes, according to things I read on a message board, you have to do this multiple times. Then there are little things like beating everyone in a room to open the door to the elevator and the door doesn’t open…and the one you came in is closed off too so you are just stuck in the room until you reboot the game. Or when the game will stop in the middle of ANYTHING you are doing to load and then do it again and again for about an hour. Or when you perform a successful targeted Fusion so you can get a healing token to bring one of your characters back and the game arbitrarily doesn’t give it to you.  I could go on as there are more bugs but you get the point. The game has been out almost a month and there have been no patches. For shame.

• Unskippable cut scenes: Yeah I praised the cut scenes above and I stand by that, but I was talking about the first time you see them. When you just died because of some cheap bullshit or because you have just had to restart or reboot because of one of the many bugs, you don’t want to sit through the same cut scene over and over. I know that the game is loading behind these scenes and that is why you can’t skip but it is a huge pain and is reflective of bad game design.

• Civil War Storyline: Okay, so I am not a hater on the Civil War story at all but using it for this game created a lot of problems. For one, it limited the characters that could be used at any given time. For another it locked the story into a sort of static framework that kept the variety out altogether. The storyline for the first game was kind of crazy and sprawled all over everwhere, from Atlantis to Asgard and Latvaria to Hell. This game has a lot of labs, warehouses and city streets. Not much variety to be found in the locations and it is mostly because of the story. Also, the branching of the story, where you have to choose Pro or Anti Registration forces you into another play through to unlock all the characters and see everything there is to see. If you save your game before you choose, you can just go back and make a different choice but you have to unlock everything again. So if you don’t have Thor, Hulk or Jean Grey yet before that save then you have to get them again. The alternative is to play again at a higher difficulty which has you retreading a lot of the game before you get to the choice and only really gives you a handful of new stages, which aren’t really new as much as just mirrors of the ones you already did. Some cool things could have been done with this but weren’t.

• Streamlining: The first game had a ton of cool stuff to collect. Every character had four extra costumes, each with their own bonuses and attributes. There were different powers for your characters you could assign based on your preference and a lot of cool things to find. This game gives you one alternate costume per character and only about four of those are worth having. Each character only has four powers and that is it. No choice here whatsoever. Also, because of the auto-leveling bug, manual point distribution is more tedious.

• Boss Battles: While some of these are cool, the majority of them drag on forever and are more of a chore than they are challenging. When you add in the fact the game will actively screw you out of healing tokens when you’ve earned them and you end up having to replay the fight it really sucks. Given that boss fights are supposed to be exciting and intense, to have them be boring is never a good sign. I hate the boss fights in this game generally just because I knew I was going to have to be doing the same thing over and over for a really long time. Build up fusion meter, perform target fusion, repeat for what seems like four hours. Thanks a bunch Titanium Man.

• Healing/revival system: I understand what the designers were trying to do here. In the first game, in order to revive a fallen character you had to wait until you got to one of the hubs scattered around that would let you revive characters, teleport back to base or switch out characters. Here you can change characters on the fly and revive a character with a health token. The problem is, unless the game randomly decides to bestow a token on you, the only way to get it is to pull off a successful fusion. If you do a clearing fusion, typically you need to hit between 15-10 enemies to get a token. The guided is pretty much the same way and a targeted fusion you need to hit someone important. So that is no big deal generally except that this is the ONLY way to revive a character and you can ONLY do a fusion when you have two characters. So if three of your guys get taken out, and the magical healing token fairy doesn’t give you any, you are out of luck unless you make it to the end of the level. The other option is to just let the last guy die and do stuff over again and hope that you are better this time or that there are no more bugs.

• Balancing: I understand the need to balance the characters so that each one is playable but I absolutely refuse to believe that a pantywaist like Shocker is going to take out the Hulk. The way the balancing works, there is little difference between a lot of the characters. It doesn’t really matter that much if you are playing Iron Man instead of Miss Marvel or Iron Fist instead of Daredevil. They all just sort of break down to projectile vs melee or flying vs ground based. There are a few characters that stand out and seem more effective but in general, a lot of the characters are interchangeable and the repetition of fusions further highlights the problem. Also whoever decided that Wolverine should be on death’s door the second you take him over is an idiot. Seriously, he is supposed to be the best at what he does. In this game what he does is go down like a bitch.

• Camera: The camera in this game is ridiculously bad. I lost track of the number of times that I was in the middle of a heated battle and I was suddenly looking at the rafter in the ceiling and not seeing the action at all. You can move the camera a bit but it doesn’t really help that much as in a lot of the cases of this the camera is stuck somewhere. It also sucks when you try to do a targeted fusion on someone standing right next to you, probably hitting you  upside the head at the time, and your target circle goes flying off screen and you can’t bring it back or even find it even when trying to move the camera around. Also, the camera will zoom out to weather map distance so that you can’t tell what is going on because you can’t find your character in the virtual ant farm of explosions and laser beams. The number of times that the camera zoomed back in to let me know that I had been beating up a tree for the past 10 minutes is staggering.

• Controls: The button placement, which you can’t change, is very strange. The jump button is mapped to the Y/triangle button and it feels really weird. This may just be my own personal thing but it seems like it should have been mapped to the A/X button. Regardless, the layout feels wonky and I found myself doing the wrong things a lot because of the confusing and uncustomizable configuration.

The Ugly

• Black Widow: How can they take one of the sexiest women in Marvel comics and make her look like she’s been hit with a brick made of ugly? Nick Fury looks sexier and I think pictures of him naked are the punishment for stealing in some countries.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I really wanted to like this game. I was really excited and I traded in Batman Arkham Asylum so I could get it. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.  The basic gameplay is intact but gets bogged down by bugs and systems that lack polish. Really that is the biggest issue with this game over all, it is not polished at all and feels like a fourth tier effort instead of the AAA title it is supposed to be. The old axiom ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies here and they really should have taken that to heart. As it stands, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is deeply flawed and very broken. If you really, really want to play out of deep devotion to the series or because you think I am an idiot, then do yourself a favor and rent the thing. You should be able to beat it in a weekend and hopefully haven’t broken any controllers.