game
Marvel Ultimate Alliance was clearly on the minds—and the hard drives—of the guys at Visual Concepts as they constructed this summer-sequel movie tie-in.
Switch-between-the-heroes D-pad interface? Check. Set of upgradeable superpowers accessed by pulling the trigger buttons? Yep. A deep, endlessly entertaining superhero romp? Um, not so fast, cowboy—looks like “fun” is the missing “F” here.
With literally no introduction whatsoever, Marvel’s dysfunctional first family is plopped down in the middle of an active volcano that houses a swarm of Skrulls, and the generic beatdown sequences commence. (The designers treat the film as a launching pad, tossing Terrax and the Red Ghost into the villains mix.)
As you flip between Thing, Torch, Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic, you can spend points earned by smashing crates and other environmental objects between missions to upgrade your cosmic powers, but you never actually earn any new ones.
Your opportunity to be super is also cramped by a cosmic power meter that bottoms out with distressing regularity, forcing you to resort to button-mash fisticuffs until it refills again. Worse, it puts The FF’s basic team strengths—the Torch’s ability to fly, the Invisible Woman’s invisibility—on a timer. Where’s the fun in that?
This feels especially odd given that the game goes out of its way to make things easy for its mass-market audience. Points at which the Torch or Mr. Fantastic must use a special power to solve a puzzle and move the action along are marked by impossible-to-miss FF icons. When one of your characters gets knocked out, you’re automatically switched to another team member…while the one you just lost revives a few seconds later.
The potential for super-greatness was totally here, as evidenced by the team’s superpowers—some of which, when you can actually use them, are almost worth the price of admission alone. Using Sue’s telekinesis power to trap a baddie in a bubble before hurling him over the side of a building is pretty amusing. The game’s fusion powers—think of them as a more user-friendly, controllable version of Ultimate Alliance’s combo moves—also offer flashes of fun but, because they tend to bottom out your cosmic power meter even faster, they’re nowhere near enough to overcome the game’s other drawbacks.
Chalk this one up as another soggy-popcorn letdown.
