Put on your spandex and swing the night away
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance gets all the basics right. It's a bit unspectacular and leaves something to be desired in terms of replayability, but I certainly can't fault the core gameplay or the fun selection of characters. It's ultimately a good game that could have been amazing, but falls just short.
GRAPHICS AND SOUND:
Ultimate Alliance doesn't have many tricks in its bag visually or aurally. What you get is a pretty solid basic look. The playable characters and villains look good, and their respective attacks and special moves are all well done. For a hack and slash game, the animations are surprisingly good, with characters feeling about as natural as they should. The environments are varied from level to level, but more textures and variations within each level would go a great ways towards making the game feel less repetitive. There's a surprising amount of detail in the minutia of some of the levels, though this can be offset by some pretty bland areas.
The sound effects and unobtrusive music carry the game in the sound department, but the sub-par voice acting can be mildly irritating. At no point did I feel like the voice actor quite matched up to the character, which certainly wasn't helped by actors who had to voice several people within the game.
GAMEPLAY:
This is pretty standard hack-and-slash action, but everything is done well enough that I can't hardly fault the game. Diablo fans, take note: this is not a loot-fest, but there is a degree of character customization that will feel right at home to fans of the venerable PC series. You'll have a ton of options (eventually) on ways you can take your characters, and although many of the characters feel like re-skins of each other, there's enough of a variation in their powers eventually to warrant branching them out. This allowed me to create some re-skin characters as bruisers, others as "boss killers," and so on. It actually works well, since I like to have a varied team, but it may not be to some people's liking.
The characters are a big focus in the game, and there's enough here that I think everyone will be able to pick a team of old favorites. The DLC villain pack is well worth a look if you're interested enough in additional characters to warrant a purchase, but an option to pick individual characters to download would have been nice.
As mentioned above in regards to the character animations, it's really surprising to me to find that everyone in the game feels right. Their controls are spot-on, and the difference between the speedier characters and the slower bruisers is definitive. You can easily whip around a screen as Spider-Man, while the Thing takes his time getting there (and dealing a whole lot of damage along the way).
I'm not a huge fan of some of the unlockables, save for the few characters you can unlock along the way. I'd have loved to have seen more usable unlockables along with the amazing amount of art, comic covers, and the like. Tiered levels of loot or rewards would have also gone a long way towards making me complete the game again.
OVERALL:
Really, your enjoyment of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is going to rely upon your taste for the genre. If you enjoy a hack-and-slash styled game with tons of player customization but not much loot, this is a solid pick, especially given its budget price these days. Fans of comics will also find a lot here to delve into as an amusing side-venture, but it's not going to shake the foundations of comic fans everywhere.
