Marvel Ultimate Alliance

I had so many problems with this game.  First there was alot of bugs and glitches.  One instance I was playing as the Thing and Rhino trapped me in a wall, and I couldn't move.  Another instance I was playing as Ghost Rider and I some how was thrown off of a ledge by a glitch.  Another time I was playing as Blade but the Vision thought I was wolverine, and the Blade started talking as Wolverine.  The biggest glitch of all is when I reached Act 5 in the game, I saved it the night before, and went to play it again the next day.  When I opened that save, I found that all the players that I unlocked through out the game were now re-locked.  I had to replay through a previous save point to get those characters back.  

Besides the glitches, the graphics were ugly as hell.  The character models during the in-game cutscenes were janky, the editing between sceens are poorly made.  The suits your character wears don't transfer over to the in-game cutscenes (I can forgive the pre-rendered CGI scenes though).  The game felt short, the levels were tiny and linear.  The boss fights were dumb minigames half of the time.  The story had terrible pacing, which forgetting plots.  I felt most of the game the developers were throwing darts at a dartboard figuring out which boss you should meet in which area, most of them seemed random and worthless.

I was not a fan of the menu set up either.  Why is it when I hit start it takes me to the menu, but when I hit start again it takes me to whatever icon it's on?  Usually when I hit start again, it means I didn't mean to hit it in the first place, and sometimes when the menu opens it's on the "Quit Game" or "Load Game" Option.  I never want to hit those on purpose!  Another one is when you go into the character menu, you hit A to do it, but to look at your characters stats you have to hit Y.  

There's also alot of loading in this game.  You would think the 360 could handle a glorified PS2 game without much loading, but oh well.  I tried dozens of times to play online, but the most people I've ever seen online was 2.  

While I think Marvel Ultimate Alliance is miles ahead of the Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath games, this was still a step down for me from X-Men Legends II.  


----------Battle System----------
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is an action RPG aka top-down Dungeonhack.  You can make up to a four party team, including yourself.  You'll have a huge list of party members to choose from right from the get-go.  You characters gain experience for each kill and quests completed.  I think you even get experience for bashing boxes and crates.  Not only does your party members share the experience but so do the characters in the reserve, so if you ever want to switch them in, they're never underpowered.  

When you gain a level you get 1 point to distribute among your special powers, but the game has this set on an auto-setting by default, but since leveling up doesn't mean as much as it did in the previous X-Men Legends games, then you might as well keep it on auto-set.  Another way to boost your stats is to buy your stats.  When you gain enough money from bashing crates and enemies, you can then go through your character menu and buy your skills if you can afford it or stats.  Each character has 4 suits they can wear, and each suit has 3 stats they can boost.  For example, Wolverine starts with his "Modern" suit, with it he can upgrade his Defense, Environment Damage and Energy.  If he switches to his Classic suit he can then upgrade his Defense, Claw Damage and Critical.  He would lose all that stats he gained from his Modern suit though.  Each boost in the stat costs $1,000 more than the previous node, so maxing out or even trying to get everyone a bunch of stat boosts is a long process that you probably won't even get close to doing by the end of the game.  You can equip only 1 accessory in the game.  The whole upgrade system in Marvel Ultimate Alliance seems weaker than the X-Men Legends and really hurts the overall single player game.

Dungeons are very basic linear paths which hordes of enemies in your way.  Sometimes you'll run into a "puzzle" which requires you to hit a switch with two characters at the same time.  This can be kinda difficult because when you switch between characters, the other one will sometimes move.  Speaking of stupid AI, I've never been more frustrated with the AI in a game like this so much in my life.  Sometimes your AI controlled characters will just commit suicide by jumping off of a ledge, other times they won't follow you.  Sometimes while you're being attacked, they're just stand there and watch.  You can change their behaviors by asking them to "Assist" or "Be Aggressive" but the computer will often change what you set, sometimes mere seconds after you've set it.  It's completely frustrating to deal with.

One new feature in the game are the God of War style boss battles.  Most of the bigger boss battles require stupid Quick-Time Events.  Another feature that might be new is the ability to grab an enemies weapon and use it against them.  One last feature that might be new is the ability to unleash a massive special attack.  You can build this attack by killing enemies, and when your avatar starts flashing you can then unleash it.  If any of your teammates currently have their powers maxed out, then they can unleash theirs in a chain attack.

There's no healing potions or mana potions in the game, which is a let down.  When one of your characters dies, you have to wait 5 minutes before you're able to revive them again.  Even then, you'll have to find a save point to revive them.  


----------Characters / Story----------
Ok, the story is simple, so I'll give you a simple rundown.  Dr. Doom has gathered a group of supervillans to take over the world.  Nick Fury and SHIELD retaliated by gathering a group of Superheroes to take on Dr. Doom, and that's it.

The story is not good at all, the dialog is laughable at times as well.  I really hate the pacing and the sheer amounts of randomness of the game or storyline.  It just seems like the developers made a bunch of random levels, and then tossed in a bunch of random bosses like Rhino or Shocker for no reason and gave them a few lines of dialog.  There's just to many characters in the game.

----------Graphics----------
Mixed bag on this one.  In X-Men Legends, they used celshading for their character designs, and I liked that quite a bit, it had character.  Marvel Ultimate Alliance dropped that and now everything is CGI.  I don't like it as much, because in X-Men Legends the characters and enemies were celshaded while the backgrounds were CGI, it made a nice contrast that was easy on the eyes, and you could see enemies and characters alot better.  In MUA the characters are dark, the backgrounds are dark, the enemies are dark, the items are dark.  It can get confusing at times.  

The level designs seem really lazy.  I'm not talking the puzzles, which seem more prevalent in this game than the previous ones, but rather just the lay out.  The whole game just feels like one linear path, and the dungeons just seem so much smaller.  X-Men Legends offered such bigger areas and much more non-linearity where you actually felt like you're crawling through a puzzle dungeon finding new things.  

Full blown CGI cutscenes look great, but you'll only see about one per-Act. The cutscenes that use the in-game engine look good to an extent.  There's good character movement, but the camera direction is terrible, the character models can be spotty at times.  Sometimes pixels will flicker, sometimes an arm looks blocky, some faces look screwed up.  It's just very last gen if you know what I'm talking about.  One very early scene really cracked me up, which was a rocket flying threw the air and blew up.  This scene looked straight out of a Saturn game from 1996.  
 

----------Sound----------
The voice acting is good, there's really nothing to complain about.  The music is forgettable for the most part.  Alot of the music is just background noise you probably won't even notice, sometimes the music will even kick off.  There was only one song in the entire game that was good or rememberable and that was the track in Murderworld which sounded like something in a Tim Burton movie.

----------World Map----------
The world map is basically exactly the same as X-Men Legends II.  The game is separated in 5 Acts, and in each Act your group of super heroes will travel to a new base set up before venturing into a new quest.  Within each base you'll find 3 recurring machines.  One is a trivia mini-game, another is a review machine that can show you all your stats and various amounts of info.  The final one is a Simulator, this allows you to fight through levels with one character to achieve high scores and to get bonus', or with a group of characters with no bonus'.

Each base has 2 areas you can visit, with a bunch of characters you can chat with if you want.  You can sometimes find optional quests if you chat with them, but there isn't much reward for doing them.  When you're ready to set out on your quest, you'll usually find one person or thing that will teleport you to the destination.  The levels are extremely linear, and seem much smaller compared to X-Men Legends II.  

When you find a save point in the game, this also will be activated into a portal of sorts.  If you want, you can "Extract" your team and travel back and forth to any previous save spot.  Most areas you visited can be backtracked, although some can be locked out.  On the save spot you can also change your team mates and change your team mates suits.  


----------Time to Complete Game----------
??:??

No idea how long I played this since they don't record your overall time.  I hate when games do this.  It's atleast 10-15 hours long, it seemed much shorter than either X-Men Legend games.  Anyways, after you beat the game you unlock a new character, hard mode and get treated with a fairly long ending.