Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Posted by Tyler | Filed under Games
If you’ve played X-Men: legends, either the first or the second one, you have played Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The mechanics are basically the same, you just play with different characters from all over the Marvel universe. The story is pretty good, though comic-book-ish (well, what did you expect?), and there are some cool side-missions you can do that give you back-story on each of the characters.
The RPG elements are there, but it’s clear that this is aimed at players that are not hardcore about their RPGs. By default all of your leveling is done automatically, and I mean automatically. It chooses everything for you. You can opt out of this on a character by character basis, which seems annoying if you want to do it for every character, but in reality you settle on a half-dozen or so that you want to be OCD about and let the rest upgrade automatically.
Like X-Men Legends, the combat gets a bit old about halfway through the game. It’s pretty much just button-mashing and using special abilities every once in awhile. There’s some God of War-style cinematic moves every once in awhile, where you have to press buttons as they flash on screen in order to complete objectives, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward.
I finished it just because I like comic books, easy games, and the story was interesting enough. Plus, there are some awesome rendered cut scenes. Specifically, there’s one with Nightcrawler that is incredible. Worth playing if you enjoyed X-Men Legends at all. If you didn’t get into X-Men Legends, it’s probably not interesting to you.
This is the online journal of