Reviewed: October 25, 2006
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Vicarious Visions
Raven Software

Released: October 25, 2006
Genre: Action-RPG
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Teen

7
8
8
8
7.9

Supported Features:

And you’ll need every bit of super hero power and their combined unique abilities to defeat Dr. Doom, who is back to his old tricks. He has recently reassembled the Masters of Evil, the greatest collection of Super Villains ever seen, and plans nothing less than world domination.

With Marvel’s own C.B. Cebulski penning the story, you can be sure this is one adventure that will hold true to the Marvel vision. Players not only determine the fate of Earth, but also control the fate of the Marvel universe. The missions you accept, the objectives you complete, and how you interact with other characters throughout the game will determine how the story plays out.

Make no mistake; Ultimate Alliance is nearly identical to the style and gameplay of X-Men Legends, only on a much greater scale and with a lot more flexibility and customization. Out of the box, you get to pick from 20 playable characters and more are unlocked as you progress through a surprisingly lengthy and varied campaign.

You are free to mix and match any available characters creating your own “team” then customize that team with a unique name, icon, vehicle, and even start building a team reputation. Ultimate Alliance now offers much more control in leveling up your characters, so you can focus on your favorites or spread the experience evenly across the team for greater balance.

Your quest will take you across 17 exotic locations, many of which like Atlantis, the Shield Heli-Carrier and the Skrull home world, will be quite familiar to Marvel fans. Each of these highly interactive levels will offer their own unique style of gameplay allowing for ground, air, and even underwater combat. These styles are enhanced with new moves, blocks, grapples, and amazing super powers.

Given the large cast of characters, Ultimate Alliance offers a custom team option that rewards you for selecting and playing as the same group of characters. After you choose your members you can name the team, give them a logo, and start to slowly build team experience that will ultimate reward you with additional roster openings, better health and damage boosters.

Ultimate Alliance does a great job of balancing the experience, so if you bring rookie characters into a seasoned party they will quickly rise through the levels with minimal effort to catch up with the rest of the party. The underlying RPG system is surprisingly complex for an action game, but for those who don’t want to micromanage the characters and their abilities, you can simply use the “auto-assign” system that will automatically pick new super-powers for each character when they level-up.

The interface is functional on the PSP but also a bit awkward compared to the console version. Picking characters and other D-pad functions now require you to hold down a trigger to shift those functions. Camera control also requires shifted face buttons. You can assign various dispositions to your party making them aggressive or defensive, and they are quick to attack whatever person or object they see you swinging at. Oddly enough, the AI is most lacking when you need to access computers or open doors that require multiple characters to get into position. Even the game instructs you to manually position each character into their spot.

Enemy AI is a bit better than your own team, or at least more predictable. Rather than focusing on the weakest character of the bunch, enemies will almost always prefer to target the human player. This can be an advantage when the less powerful characters like Elektra and Spider-Woman start crying out that they need help. Merely swoop in and distract their attackers and save the day. You can also get enemies to follow you to key areas where you can then toss them off ledges or into other objects for extra damage or instant death.

Heroes never die, at least in Ultimate Alliance, and if you or anyone else in your party goes down they are temporarily disabled and removed from the party for a set amount of time. If you find a Shield pad before that time is up you can replace the injured member with a new hero until you are notified that they are back and ready for active duty. You can also use these Shield pads to save your game and swap any characters or even the entire team if you wish. These pads are strategically located so you won't have to replay too much of any given level, and they also let you try various party configurations for the tougher encounters that are usually close by.

Each character has their own set of melee and grapple moves, which work really nice. You can even disarm the enemy if you do a grab move at just the right time. Nothing is more satisfying that grabbing a guy and tossing him to his immediate demise rather than beating on him for 10-20 seconds to achieve the same goal. You can also use the trigger to shift those physical attacks into super-hero moves and powers, whereby the face buttons are reassigned to character-specific actions. Characters will often have many more than four moves at their disposal, so you will need to pick and assign your favorites for the quick-access menu.

Super-powers are now much more interactive than before. Previously, you used to hit the button and watch the animation, but now many of the moves require further interaction like continued button presses to keep the attack alive for extended damage. It’s pretty cool, especially with characters like Colossus and The Thing. Oh, and speaking of Colossus; you’ll never get tired of using him to pick up enemies and wield them like ragdoll weapons. And one of the best super-powers has to be Captain America’s shield, which can be upgraded later in the game so you can actually control it after it’s thrown.

Ultimate Alliance can wear a bit thin on your patience as an action gamer in that it gets noticeably repetitive at times, both in visual style and gameplay. Not counting the quick detour to Stark’s amazing office complex, the first two main levels, the Heli-Carrier and the runaway mobile lab look painfully identical in overall theme and texture art. It's best to tackle this game in short doses to avoid getting burned out, unless you have a friend to share the expereience with, in which case it's a lot more fun.

You’ll find yourself mindlessly bashing away at cloned copies of henchmen who neither look nor fight any differently than the last 20-30 guys you pummeled into the ground. The levels are highly interactive, meaning you can break just about anything you can see. Many items splinter apart with a single hit while larger objects have their own health meter that needs to be whittled down before exploding like a piñata giving up its coins and blue and red energy.

Speaking of rewards, Ultimate Alliance has a vast collection of unlockables and hidden secrets just waiting to be found. Alternate costumes are guaranteed to delight hardcore fans of the various characters, but in a brilliant design decision, these aren’t merely visual upgrades – each costume comes with its own set of upgradeable stat bonuses. In addition to costumes there are one-time-use attribute boosters and hidden comic book pages that unlock character-specific missions.

So you and your heroic team will smash and bash their way through linear constructed levels, eliminating henchmen, computer terminals, and countless crates and barrels, all leading up to mid-level sub-bosses and ultimately, the big showdown with guys like Galactus and Dr. Doom. The big boss battles are now much more engaging than previous super-hero outings. Not only does the game take on a new visual style for these boss battles, low down and close up, you will often have to figure out unique strategies to defeat them, almost like self-contained mini-games. It’s a nice escape from all the button mashing leading up to these encounters.

There aren’t that many puzzles in the game and the ones that do pop up aren’t terribly clever. One of the first “puzzles” is replacing a broken piece of machinery to lower a forcefield, but the preceding cutscene show you exactly where the old and new pieces are leaving nothing to really figure out. Each story mission has its own set of primary and secondary objectives and most are easily completed through the natural flow of the game.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is all about teamwork; both in the game and even in the way you play the game. The PSP version offers a functional multiplayer component for both Ad Hoc and Internet play including arcade and cooperative story modes. This online support is even integrated into the solo experience. The first question you are asked after loading up the game is if you want ot enable stat tracking. Doing so earns you the immediate reward of unlocking Hawkeye.

Setting up or joining a game is fairly simple. Ultimate Alliance uses GameSpy and there are only a few possible options to tweak when setting up a game like difficulty, max players, and the style of play. You can start a new campaign or load a save game from yours and continue from there. Stat tracking is available in both online and solo gameplay.

Textures are definitely lower in resolution and all of the gorgeous real-time lighting and shadow effects that brought the levels to life on the console are gone. Even so, the game is packed with special effects and lots of color. It easily rivals and probably surpasses the PSP version of X-Men Legends II, which is saying a lot. As long as you haven't seen the console version you won't know what you are missing, and in all fairness, Ultimate Alliance is still a great looking game given the limitations of the system and the daunting task of cramming this thing into a handheld system.

Sound effects are just as good as the music with all sorts of environmental effects that fit the visuals perfectly. Melee comes with all the expected physical sounds and the super-powers unleash a fury of audio that is only rivaled by their blinding graphics. As expected, it’s all mixed in Dolby Digital for a true 3D experience.

Speech and dialogue run the gamut from extremely witty and true-to-character (opening movie) to some pretty lame one-liners that are too few in quantity and too common in their delivery. And since you have no direct control over the taunts and boasts you are at the mercy of the game as to when and how often you hear them. I’m guessing the designers figured that with so many characters available you wouldn’t be spending enough time with any one of them to notice their limited vocabulary.

One excellent feature that helps tailor the game experience is the interactive dialogue between your heroes and the villains and bosses you encounter during the game. These are keyed to certain characters, so depending on whom you have in your party at the time of these encounters will yield unique conversations and gameplay opportunities.

Of course the main reason to keep playing is the diverse cast and the huge potential to mix and match just about any type of super-hero team you can imagine. Create the right team and stick with them for some nice loyalty rewards.

So, if you love comics, super-heroes, or just want to experience a fun and challenging action-RPG, Ultimate Alliance delivers the goods. Sure, the levels and even the gameplay get a bit repetitive at times, but there is always great action and the potential to share that action with your friends, and that is what really make this game rise above its predecessors and a total joy to play.