Dharma Bum

Well, I just burned through my first run of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. That was a pain in the ass. Controls that decided whether or not to respond on a whim, PS2 graphics, game crashing bugs, and an RPG upgrade system that pretty much did everything for you, making the choices you made if you took the system into your own hands feel futile.

Its cool seeing Spider-Man next to Wolverine next to Iron Man next to Ghost Rider, kicking ass and unleashing the fury on some Doom Bots and Asgardian Viking warriors… But it would be a lot cooler if they would just abandon the freakin’ dungeon crawler look. The environments look like crap, the characters look like crap, there’s no lip synch in-game… Basically, the whole game is alternating between the a-button and b-button while trying to get from one side of the map to another.

All of the character pretty much control exactly the same. There is virtually no incentive to choose to play as Colossus over Luke Cage, or Spider-Man over Deadpool, or Captain America over Mr. Fantastic. The selection of characters is initially pretty impressive, and its fun to put together teams like the Fantastic Four or the New Avengers, but its all cosmetic, which eventually becomes boring. There’s also a lot of heavy hitters missing due to rights issues. Volition has The Punisher busy cleaning up New York, Ubisoft has The Hulk under lockdown, and there are zero (0) characters from any of the Max comics. Not even Keanu Reeves as Constantine. In other words, this is a very kid friendly game, and if you have a nephew to keep quiet for a few hours, sit him down with this and you can go use the internet in peace. I, however, hated this game.

Ultimate Alliance had a lot of potential and failed me miserably. It had a lot of hype behind it, and a lot of that hype carried into the initial 8.0ish reviews. In the end, this game disappoints more than Ang Lee’s big gay Hulk movie.