Marvel Ultimate Alliance for PS3 Review
Raven Software’s Marvel Ultimate Alliance is the first RPG for the Playstation 3. Raven has a solid pedigree from its two X-Men games, and this is much the same style of game-play and graphics. If you liked them, you’ll like this.
This time, everything is bigger. Marvel Ultimate Alliance pits a cast of more than twenty playable heroes against Dr Doom and a huge roll-call of supervillains in a battle that crosses the galaxy and multiple dimensions. While there’s a bit of ‘me too’ spurious justification, mostly the plot is solid and a lot more present than in many console games. Dr Doom’s ultimate plan remains a secret for most of the game. How much you’ll care is another matter, as the game basically boils down to a satisfying dungeon bash interspersed with boss battles and cut scenes heavy with exposition.
You’ll start off playing Wolverine, Captain America, Thor, and Spiderman, but after a few levels you’ll get to choose your own team. Given the variety of superheroes you have to play with, it’s tempting to swap them in and out, but keeping your team consistent will earn it reputation points, which you can spend on specific bonuses. In addition, particular combinations earn their own special bonuses. Picking all mutants will earn you the X-Men bonus, or less obviously, an all-girl team gets you the Femme Fatale bonus.
Each character earns experience points as you go, which you can spend on increasing their unique special powers. While this lets you specialise members of your team in ranged attacks or melee, don’t worry about others falling behind. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance keeps your unplayed characters sitting one level behind your played ones. So if you feel the need to swap another character in, they won’t get creamed. You can also shift experience points between skills at any time, so when you feel you’ve made a mistake you can correct it. You can buy experience points too, using the cash you get for beating up supervillains.
And if all that’s not enough to play with, each character has three unlockable costumes. This isn’t just playing dress-ups: each one has different effects on the superhero. You can level up each costume, too. There’s equipment to pick up, though disappointingly this doesn’t show up on your characters.
The AI in Marvel Ultimate Alliance isn’t terrible, and the game is perfectly playable solo. It offers support for four players, though, either locally or online. Multiplayer offers co-operative and arcade modes. Co-operative is just the same as the single-player game, and if you’re hosting on-line you can load up a saved game from your own campaign. Arcade offers the slight variation of having players competing for points on each level. The on-line version does occasionally suffer from some crippling lag.
The game has some odd unevenness about it. Frame rates drop sometimes even if you’re not playing on-line, and some background textures look like they weren’t quite finished in time. There’s a smoothness to character models that you’d expect from this kind of comic-style game, and some of the particle effects that come with using special powers are really gorgeous. Still, the graphics just aren’t as sharp and detailed as some seventh-generation console games.
Then there are the gameplay features that have been added to what’s a cross-platform game in order to use the Playstation 3′s Sixaxis controller. With the possible exception of following the tilt commands in the boss fights, they all feel tacked on, unnecessary, and in some cases more trouble than not using the shiny new toy.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is a solid RPG with a detailed story and a power of game play. It has a couple of customization features that do away with annoying niggles in other RPGs. It’s a pity, then, that a couple of technical problems make it less fun than it could have been.
Add comment January 5th, 2007