It's Mahvell, Baby!
It's almost inconceivable that someone who owned a 360 didn't have the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It was packaged with the system, along with Forza, during the 360's hay day and was sold at most used game retailers at a rock bottom price. And really, there was no reason not to have MUA, as it was an entirely competent beat-em-up which could be played at it's full potential locally rather than over Live. Yet it wasn't a great game, as it seemed to outstay it's welcome after the first three hours and was full of characters that I'm sure no one cares or even heard of.
Enter Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which has vastly improved the X-men Legends/MUA formula by doing all the little things right.
The story this time around is based on the Secret War and Civil War arc of the Marvel Universe. Basically, a B-List team of superheroes botch the apprehension of a group of villains with disastrous results for around 600 civilians. This leads to the government enacting the Superhero Registration Act where all heroes would be trained and employed by the government. This leads to a schism in the Marvel Universe, with Pro-Act party being led by Iron Man and the Anti-Act party being led by Captain America. You, and essentially the rest of the playable characters, get to choose which side to fight for which leads you down one of two story paths. MUA 2 does a pretty decent job of telling the Civil War story in a way that people who have never read the comics will never feel left out of the loop and is still an engaging enough story to keep everyone interested, which is rather rare for a beat-em-up. The story takes a rather hard turn away from the actual events of Civil War, but in the end it seems fit a video game better than the original story would have.
The gameplay in MUA 2 is much smoother than it was in it's predecessor. A simple right stick push will tell you what and where your current objective is, thus ending the need for a mini-map and the constant lost wandering that consumed far too much time in games previous. Leveling and equipping your characters is much easier, with the amount of menus to go through being reduced to two easy screens. Skills have been trimmed down to four this time around, with many of the more useless skills in previous games being combined into one cool one. Instead of costume based enhancements, MUA 2 instead gives you four enhancement skills to pour your American Dollars in to, two of which are based upon whether you chose to Register or not. This gives you the freedom to choose whichever stupid ass, yellow spandex-y costume you want without worrying whether it was the best costume enhancement-wise. More importantly for people playing locally, all players can level up their character without interrupting the game by using a mini-menu. Even better is the fact that while in this menu, your character will be auto-controlled, thus not making you an easy target for a bullet to the eyeball.
The most improved aspect of gameplay in MUA 2 is the increased power of your...well, powers. In MUA 1, at most you'd face a room of around eight guys who would mostly require you to grab them one at a time, punch them six times, than pull off a finisher. In MUA 2, the screen will at times completely fill up with ne'er do-wells, and you will find yourself doing some ridiculous fighting in what I imagine to be much truer to the source material. Nothing captures the feel of a comic book team-up than four heroes being vastly out numbered and still coming out on top again and again. It keeps the game from outwearing it's welcome too fast and leads to you feeling like a big man, beating up fifty death-robots with Daredevil. Fusion powers, which was really the big feature that Vicarious Visions was pushing, are interesting enough at first, but seem to be reused throughout the roster, with only a set of about 10 truly unique Fusions. Eventually, they just become a way of killing a boss faster.
The voice work is very nice. Nothing really stands out, which is exactly the way voice work should be. No one wants to hear Spider-Man have a terrible, nasally voice for five hours (I'm looking at you, Web of Shadows). Pretty much all the voice actors from MUA 1 came back, only this time round they have a little better dialogue to work with. Hey, Deadpool was actually sort of funny this time around, rather than being constantly annoying and lacking in any wit like before. The music sounded a lot like the music from the Iron Man movie. There was a lot of rock and sort-of metal. Again, nothing special, which is completely fine by me for this sort of game.
Graphically, the game is obviously an improvement from before. It's been three years since the last game came out, and MUA 2 seems to take on the same graphic style that Marvel games have been treated to for the last couple years. Luke Cage and Wolverine are actually wearing exactly what they were wearing in Web of Shadows, actually, and look identical. More important are the environments, which thankfully are nicely detailed and, for the most part, nice and bright. No depressing brown and grey here!
In summation, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is one of those rare sequels in which the developers actually fix all of the problems of the first games and make something really worthwhile. Any superhero, beat-em-up fan or someone who has four controllers should definitely give MUA 2 a look-see.
