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Marvel's Ultimate Alliance 2

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I’ve always had a soft spot for the button mashing, beat ‘em up genre of video games. The old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games still hold a special place in my heart. So, like many other video game and comic book nerds, I was very excited when Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was announced for consoles in 2006. It was a solid game with a great cast of characters that left me wanting a sequel that improved upon its flaws. Now, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is upon us after a very rigorous online marketing campaign, and sadly, I am not as satisfied as I hoped I would be.

What irks me the most about MUA2, when compared to its predecessor, is that for as many steps as it took forward, it took just as many steps back. Story wise, MUA2 is far superior, as it follows Marvel’s Civil War story arc. In the Marvel universe a bill is about to be passed that would require all super heroes to register with the government. This splits the supers in half, with some, like Captain America and Luke Cage strongly opposing registration, and others like Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic supporting the act. In game you get to decide which side you support, either pro-reg or anti-reg, and the story changes around your decision.

Game play, though, even with the addition of the Fusions powers, feels a little lackluster. The biggest problem is the simplification of character customization. In the first game, you had a large array of powers to choose from, items to equip, different costumes that changed your abilities, and specialized team abilities. In MUA2 each character only has four powers to chose from, a handful of passive abilities to upgrade and three slots for team boosts, which you find around the game world and receive for accomplishing tasks. It is much harder to build the super hero that fits in with your preferred style of play. The large cast of characters, including fan favorites like Gambit and Deadpool, as well as classics like Spider-Man and Thor, does make it a bit easier to find a character that works for you, but more customization would definitely have been nice.

Fusion powers are the biggest addition, game play wise. Fusion powers are powerful, screen clearing attacks that have two super heroes fusing their powers together into one giant show of force. The game boasts over 250 of these fusion attacks. Each of the 24 playable characters has a unique fusion power with each of the other super heroes. They are great fun to pull off and most of them look amazing, but too many of the 250 are the exact same thing, just different characters using them. For example, pretty much every fusion juggernaut's power (and any other of the really physically strong characters) involves him ripping up a giant piece of the ground he is standing on and having another character charge it up, whether it be with ice, fire, sonic energy, bombs, etc, to make it explode even harder when he throws it at an enemy. A little more creativity could have gone a long way.

Visually, the graphics and presentation do a great job of matching the art style of Civil War. Most powers look great and the level design is giant leap ahead of the first game. The voice acting, on the other hand, is sometimes laughable. Those cheesy one-liners that super heroes love to say after beating up a guy in comics just don’t translate well to the spoken word. Unless you’re Deadpool, then everything you say is just amazing.

While it was not everything I had hoped it to be, I still had a great time playing through Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2. I even plan on playing it through another time to get the other side of the Civil War story. That fun increased greatly while playing with a friend online. For those on the edge on whether or not to buy it: definitely wait for a price drop, because as is, it is nothing more than a rental.