Pros: a lot of nice action and some good puzzles
Cons: this non marvel geek felt a little loss sometimes.
The bottom line: spa,tu,la.
I got the holiday pack when I got my xbox 360 and in it came this game and a racing called Forza. I went and hook up my 360 to the internet and bought a bunch of arcade games and the original Halo and have been playing those, but last week I decided I better bust these games out and give them a try. Forza is not the type of racing game I am into so I decided to go towards Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Now I am not a really big comic book geek, I have seen animated shows and movies about the more popular ones, and that is pretty much were my expertise ends. So I was a bit unprepared for the amount of Marvel geekdom that is in this game, not that it’s a bad thing if you are a comic book nerd then this is probably an equivalent of a wet dream, the rest of the game is pretty good to.

Story.
Dr. Doom and his alliance of evil has attack Shield and Nick Fury has gathered the greatest super heroes in the universe to fight them. While the story may seems simple each stage is followed by an intermission were you can talk to people and learn more about the back story and do bonus mission to uncover a conspiracy about the black widow. It is also a good way to learn about some of the more 2nd rate non movie and tv series comic book characters like Dead Pool who is pretty funny. And the story takes you some pretty interesting stages the an amusement park, the Viking version of heaven, and then literally through hell.

The one thing I did learn though is a lot of the old marvel super heroes were created by radiation, a mystical thing back in the 60’s but any kid now days should know everything admits radiation. I did not find a super hero who put on his wrist watch to tight and become wrist watch man and that I was disappointed.

Graphics.
There a mix bag really a lot of the character sprites are from the PS2 and Xbox era but the visuals themselves have been updated to work well on a HD set. It doesn’t look to bad when your fighting has the game deals with an over head view camera so you can see a lot of the action unhinder. But you can see some sprites that are PS2 era easily when you zoom in for conversations, still not bad.

Sound.
The music in the game is ok but there isn’t to much to really write home about. The VA’s on the other hand are top notch and include some of the best in the business like Cam Clarke and Steve Blum.

Gameplay.
The game in itself is a brawler. You get to control 4 marvel super heroes of your choosing and one you will control and the other 3 will be AI control. The idea is to go out and beat up the bad guys with your chosen super hero. While there are several characters to choose from they fall in to about 3 groups. You got the fighters, the flyers, and the big dudes. The fighters would be guys like Captain America and Wolverine there really good at destroying the bad guys and the grunts. Then there are flyers like Thor and the Iron man these guys are good at attacking opponents from the air or just getting past pesky obstacles. Then finally there are the big ones like the Thing and Colossus. They move slow and attack slow but there grapple attacks especially can do a lot of damage. Also when you make your selection that if you put 4 super heroes from the same comic together (like 4 x-men) you will get a stat bonus for doing that.

The action has far has fighting is pretty button mashey 3 attack buttons which include light attack, and strong attack, and grapple. Combining these will do the most amount of damage in a combo. While a button basher it was fun to get bad guys in a grabble beat them up with light attack and then finish them off with a finishing move using B, Wolverines move for doing this definitely ranks a 9 in the ouch meter. Has you battle your characters will level up and unlock new super powers which can be used by holding down the left trigger and holding a button. Also the older characters like Captain America and Spiderman have there old costumes that can be unlocked and used each with a special ability that can be upgraded. All in all despite having some general types each character does have some unique traits to them.

The levels themselves are over the head and the game tries to put in some dungeon crawler type puzzles to break up the action. The puzzles usually are pretty simple though, push a box, and pull a lever, door open continue bashing heads. All though it was nice that they included a few puzzles in some of the boss fights. A lot of the smaller bosses are too easily beaten up just by using a melee attacks from a fighter character like Wolverine. But a few of the end level ones to take a strategy and you have to solve a puzzle, for instance in one you have to trick a bug into a portal to blow up a robot that is protecting the boss, before you can go in and do some attacks on the boss. Another puzzle has you hitting a switch to suck a bad guy down a drain so you can have a confrontation with him on the ground. Some pretty interesting boss fights in this game.

Xbox live.
I wish I could put something here but I didn’t find anyone to play online each time I tried. You can also spend 10 bucks to unlock 8 extra heroes but I am cheap and thought it was a bit of a rip off so I didn’t bother downloading them either.

Final Recommendation.
The game is tailor towards the Marvel Geek and it’s not hard to show when there are characters that a lot of people never heard of start popping up, that said it shows that the makers obviously cared about the license. And they made a pretty good fighting game based around it.