Review: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
As your gang completes quests and saves the world, it gains reputation points just as the individuals acquire experience. Gain enough notoriety, and you can bestow members with improved experience, defense, attack power, and more just for working together. You can even expand your roster to include more members, so don't worry about being saddled with the same four goodie-two-shoes forever.
Party of Four
PROTIP: Get in the habit of making the most of every advantage. Pipes that are lying around can be used to bash enemies, and will do more damage than one of Spidey's punches.
As much of a blast as Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is to play by yourself, it really takes off when you add another pair of hands or three, and not just because it makes simultaneous combination attacks so much easier to pull of. For the first time, you can take the action online, playing through the full campaign cooperatively or competitively. You might have to scramble a bit more to pick up your fair share of the coins that spill from destroyed vases, barrels, crates, and statues, but it's worth the workout.
Playing with friends has no effect on the puzzles, which amount to finding your way around obstacles, rearranging spheres to open doors, and shuffling crates from pressure plate to pressure plate, but they're usually just enough to keep you thinking on your feet, and not so tough that you'll be stumped for more than thirty seconds at a time.
The five acts of the main campaign offer a long and satisfying story filled with quests and intrigue, and the more than thirty training levels should help you grind your way through Hard mode without endlessly replaying the same scenario.
Finding Flaws
PROTIP: Smash all barrels, vases, etc. as they may drop a few coins or health and energy orbs. Destroying machinery and walls just wastes your time.
There are a few areas for the inevitable sequel to improve on. For one, currency can only be used to upgrade costumes. (Well, skills too, if you're feeling rich). There's no shop in which to purchase or sell gear, and each hero can only equip a single item at a time. The level of destructibility has dropped as well: though you can smash vases and throw explosive barrels, the debris created by your combat consistently fails to impress.
Similarly, though the environments themselves are more inventive and textured with loving precision, the jump in graphics quality for the Xbox 360 isn't high enough, even with some shiny floors and Johnny Storm's pyrotechnics.
None of these picked nits prevent Marvel: Ultimate Alliance from being a great action RPG, though, and fans of either the genre it belongs to, or the huge gang of characters that populate it, will love this game to pieces.
PROTIP: Not everything you pick up should be treated lightly. Some barrels are highly explosive, and could just about kill you. They're also effective against enemies, so make good use of them, but don't blow a friend halfway across the room in the process.
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