Kevin Roberson

If Arkham Asylum recently raised the bar on hero franchise beat-em-ups, then Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 just got clothes-lined. The gameplay mechanics are dated and repetitive and the physics and enemy interactions are poorly scripted and bland. But the voice acting and super hero quips are good, so in honor of the fantastic dialogue I’m going to do this review using as many super hero style puns as possible!

They’re comic book characters so it’s supposed to look a bit sketchy, but nothing here really draws you in.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is the sequel to a successful beat-em up game released in 2006 whose major selling point was the ability to play as any of a wide variety of marvelous characters. The game was praised for its variety in level design and writing. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 tends to stick to city and building based level designs, throwing exciting locales like Asgard and Mephisto’s realm out the window. And believe me when I say, once you’ve tossed an enemy through a few department store windows, you’ve tossed them through the mall.

MUA2’s major selling point is the player’s choice to accept or reject a Hero Registration act which forces all super humans and masked avengers to register their secret identities with the government. Though a good idea in theory, practically this just means the heroes get split up in a nonsensical manner, making one or two heroes unplayable due to their necessity in cutscenes. Of course they can’t deny you access to your favorites, so the registration act gimmick is only a small portion of the game, consuming one or two levels at best. Eventually everyone realizes they’ve been fighting each other like cannibals over who can better serve their fellow man, and the conflict ends. But this is how free choice and branching plotlines always work out; a gimicky selling point that has to be dropped so the writing can be half way decent. This just goes to show that no matter how much you try to push the envelope; it’ll still be stationary.

MUA2’s second selling point is the variety of heroes you can play. This means they had to make every hero equally powerful to get the player to use them all without limiting their choices. Saying Daredevil is an equal match to The Thing can be qualified on a blind leap of faith, but Mr. Fantastic is a stretch of the imagination. And even there, the balancing is far from perfect. The Invisible Woman wasn’t even worth looking at, Penance doesn’t have a point, nobody fights with Cyclops and if you take Storm out of the game entirely she won’t be mist. Luke Cage is over powered, Iceman is pretty cool, Venom is caustic, and Wolverine is the best there is (no punch line there, it’s just true). In reality, you’ll just be using the characters with regenerating health, Wolverine and Deadpool, and switching between them when things get tough so that you never die.

Another down side to the huge selection of playable characters is the homogenized controls. Hit face buttons to attack and hold another button to toggle the face buttons into super powered attacks. In the beginning tutorial it was overwhelming to learn four different move sets. At one point I forgot how to throw Captain America’s shield, but it soon came back to me. Once you’ve finished the incomplete tutorial, the bindings are kept nearly identical on all new characters. A is your ranged attack, B is your area effect attack, X is your charging into the fray maneuver and Y is a useless wild card because at that point they ran out of ideas for most of the characters. Given these bindings, some crucial powers are strangely remiss. Spiderman can’t climb on walls, The Invisible Woman can’t go invisible, and Mr. Fantastic can’t squeeze through tight spaces. All characters have some degree of super strength and nearly the same amount of health and bullet resistance. Everyone can throw cars, just in case you wanted to see just how a Mercedes Bends.

The only real justification for having so many characters is to combine their powers in special attacks. But the number of special attacks totals about five with slightly different animations depending on who you’re combining. The only truly distinct and useful one is the one shown to you in the opening cut scene with Wolverine and Iron Man. Everything is a generic tool for either running around the battlefield trampling things, or creating big incomprehensible blasts that clear the screen in a radius of the intended target.

All but a couple of boss battles in MUA2 are nearly identical. At first I wasn’t sure if I was supposed watch for patterns and weak spots when I’d see a villain do a charge up animation, but then it hit me: They’re basically playable characters with no limit on the frequency of use on their super powers, and a hundred times your health. There are two notable exceptions to this, being Yellowjacket, who is unequivocally the most boring boss fight ever, and Nick Fury who, like Sergeant Pepper, is a seasoned veteran.

The graphics are hardly worth mentioning.  Everything looks like wet clay because apparently mixing the color brown with bloom equals realism. They’re comic book characters, so they’re supposed to look a bit sketchy, but nothing here really draws you in.

All the problems so far would be tolerable if the combat system were actually fun, like Batman: Arkham Asylum. But after playing such a dynamic beat-em-up, it’s hard for me to accept things like floating health bars and flying numbers. Enemies have a few animations depending on if they get knocked flying, knocked out or simply punched. These reactions rarely seem appropriate reactions to the offending attack. When there are lots of enemies on the screen, which is to say, all the time, the camera is certainly not your friend when trying to figure out where you are or where the guy you’re hitting it.

True to the formula, the game tries to make you feel like a super hero by giving you waves of baddies to destroy, costing whoever you’re fighting millions in ineffective robot parts, leading me to wonder why they keep building them. This means the fights stay on the ground and are rather condensed. Cars and crates around might get broken and people might get flung off rooftops but other than that you don’t have the sense of doing anything super like climbing up buildings, leaping across rooftops and flying through the sky. They seem to have thus missed the entire point of super hero games. If I want to fight things that are challenging but not overwhelming, which I can face because I’ve been given the tools for doing so, I’d go play every other game genre. Why label them as super, a short version of “superior,” when everyone else, friend or foe, has them, and everyone else’s function oddly the same due to a normalized control scheme?

The game’s only real good point are the plot and cut-scenes. Complex battle plans with good voice over’s and cinematic prerendered movies make this feel like a true test of the Marvel cast. Sadly, due to the games limitations, every battle tactic and intro movie is a long, contrived excuse for “you go here and beat the crap out of anything that moves.”

Lacking an entertaining combat system this game falls flat on its kryptonite (yeah, I know that’s a DC reference, so sue me). Calling this game so much as average would be mean to other average games. The voice acting is good, especially Deadpool, and the cut scenes would make this a good animated movie almost on their own; but that’s no reason to buy or even play the game. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go play Brutal Legend now because seven days without a good game to play tends to make one week.

Wounded: 2/5