Better than X-men Legends. Worse than the best game ever made

When I first heard about Marvel Ultimate Alliance, I jumped on it right away. Being a fan of Marvel comics, having a game with over a hundred characters from the comics in it sounded like an absolute blast. I got the Wii version right away and sold it because the control scheme was odd, and I tried it again on the PS3. They took X-men legends and made it better!

The story in the game is really basic, but they really dwell on it a lot through the game and you will be watching cut-scene after cutscene enduring through tons of text talking with new characters, some of them familiar to fans fans, but a lot of them are really pretty much unheard of villains and heroes. The story follows twenty superheroes that you can change in various spots in the story. You have your choice between which superhero you want, and the story doesn't change in any way if you pick a different character than another. Dr. Doom has brought a group of supervillains together called the Masters of Evil, perhaps the cheesiest name of a supervillain group ever. Now, you as the group of superheroes must destroy the Masters of Evil. The story starts out weak, and continues to be weak for the rest of the story so you will probably be skipping every bit of text through the game, or else be bored to tears having to endure an extremely boring story.

The game is a action rpg dungeon crawler hack n' slash button masher! Now, some people hate these types of games, and some people hate it and you have probably decided whether or not to keep reading or not. In case that long genre/subgenres didn't make any sense to you, the game feels like Untold Legends, X-men Legends, Baldur's Gate, and the Ys series, to name a few. Basically, Zelda without all puzzles. It's a great dungeon crawler hack n slash, perhaps the best I've ever played. It really borrows everything it has from X-men Legends, so if you liked those games, you'll definitely like this one.

So what do you do in the game? Well, it's really simple! You have a mini map in the corner of your screen, go to the area it tells you to go to. On the way there, you will be battling various up to hundreds of creatures that generally don't have any special way of killing them, just press buttons until the guy is dead. Once you get to the next area, you fight a boss. It's really simple gameplay, and there is almost no puzzle to the gameplay, making it simple enough for kids, and fun enough for adults.

Old hack n slash rpgs held my attention for maybe thirty minutes to an hour, but then after realizing the game had no new gameplay elements to it than at the beginning of the game, it started getting mind numbingly repetitive. The thing that really sets this one aside from the others is the battle system, and let me tell you, it stays fresh for a long time. You go in groups of four super heroes, although since you can switch heroes at save points, I don't know why they just didn't make it so you could have all the super heroes attacking at once, the game would be a lot easier. You can change you characters at any time, but it's wise to choose your characters that you want for the rest of the game to build up their stats and collect coins to purchase armor and spells for them, (although the characters you don't use still build experience as your guys level up). The battle system is really fast paced and the characters do very similar to what they do in the comic books. If you pick Spiderman, you can web sling. If you pick invisible woman, well... I think you get the picture. Other games like this had such a boring feel to them, you get one character for the whole game, and you had two buttons to attack. In this game you press X to do a regular attack, O to do a special attack, square grabs, and then when you hold down R2 your buttons get switched to do special abilities. Examples of the special abilities are Spiderman's web shot, the Human Torch's flame attack. You get many special abilities for every character and every attack in the game varies with which hero you use.

Think about that every game like this, you get one character to play for the whole game, with one set of moves. In this one you get twenty characters with all different sets of moves and more attacks than a main character will have in this game! The amount of heroes really takes away the repetitious gameplay, but still the concept of the game is repetitious as every level is basically the same as you travel through corridors upon corridors of similar looking walls and dispersing of enemies in your path. The boss battles are nothing to write home about and are usually just the same as the regular bad guy you will be fighting, just get all your guys near him and press the attack buttons as fast as you can and he should be dead in a few minutes. I played co-op mode on this game, which is a blast, with a guy who really hasn't played any video games for years and he got right into the gameplay and was just as good as I was. It's a game that will be fun for beginners to game, (although the game can get fairly tough at times) but people who want advanced, challenging, and gameplay that doesn't have such a repetitious concept may want to look elsewhere. It's bearable to play through the game, but sometimes it just gets boring, and playing this game for a few hours leaves an odd taste in your mouth that makes you feel like you just walked in a constant circle for an hour. It is a lot better than any other title like this, and I enjoyed it, which is rare for me with these types of games. I encourage everyone to at least give it a shot. I think kids especially will love it and hardcore gamers will like it too, but after experiencing all the characters, the gets boring and it's definitely a hard game to finish, taking me 20 hours to beat, and there is a slim chance that your attention span will hold up for this game that long, but if you have played games like this before and beaten them, you'll most assuredly be able to make it through this game.

The graphics in the game are good at times and bad at times. The levels look alright, but the hallways upon hallways look so repetitive as you never see new textures for sometimes hours, but the walls look shiny and nice so it's a hit and a miss. The superheroes look good, and are excellently crafted and seem to be done to scale, and the enemies that you will be seeing a lot, (like certain bosses minions) will look good. But when you actually get to the boss, expecting something great, you get a very poorly designed character that has jagged textures and a really dull look instead of the shininess that everything else seems to possess. The graphics are alright, but really could improved with some more time under the microscope.

The sound is pretty good. There is a ton of voicework in the game, (although you will probably be skipping most of it) and it it done well. However, the music in the game will sometimes switch from heroic trumpet music to rock, and often the music cuts in and out. The clashing of the enemies battling sounds great and you will hear several different noises in battle. At least they didn't overuse the character's catch phrazes, but in the rare event that you hear "Just your neighborhood Spiderman" or "Flame on" don't worry, they aren't as bad as one would think.

I played this directly after playing the new Untold Legends game on the PS3, and let me tell you, this game is way better and is definitely worth a rent to try out the genre if you haven't tried games like Baldur's Gate, and if you like these sort of games go out and buy this immediately. If you don't like these games, there is a chance that this game will be the exception, I think it's better than others like this. Great game, but I highly recommend renting it before buying.