Marvel Ultimate Alliance Review (X360)

Character Advancement and Team Building

Similar to X-Men Legends, the character advancement in Marvel Ultimate Alliance can be as hands-on or hands-off as you want. You can manually pick all of the upgrades and stat improvements, or you can just set it so that it is all handled automatically. That is very handy for when you just want to play through the game and is particularly nice for multiplayer when you don’t want people constantly going through the menus.

Other nice touches are available in the character and team selection. By making specific well-known teams, you earn significant bonuses that help you out in combat. When a character gets knocked out in battle, you can wait a few minutes and then revive them, or you can make a portal and warp back to home base and swap them out for a fresh character. This keeps the game moving forward so you aren’t outnumbered or overpowered very often.

Co-Op

The best way to play Marvel Ultimate Alliance is in co-op mode, and whether you play on a single system or over Xbox Live, the experience is very fun. It really adds a lot to tackle these levels alongside your friends and it is especially nice when you have the resident comic expert on board to point out references and tell you stuff. Xbox Live play is smooth and doesn’t suffer from the crippling TV resolution glitch from X-Men Legends II, but it isn’t perfect either. Friends can’t just jump into your game when they want. Instead, you have to save and quit and then hook up with your friends and get back into the game. Not a huge problem, but annoying.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Marvel Ultimate Alliance looks very nice on the Xbox 360. Everything is very detailed and sharp looking, and the variety in the level design is very much appreciated. The characters are extremely detailed and well animated, though it can be argued that they are a bit too shiny and plastic looking. I think they look great.

The sound is also very well done. The music sounds great and changes to match what is going on in the game. There is a lot of voice work, and some characters definitely sound better than others, but overall, the spoken dialogue is of good quality. One complaint I do have is that you will hear the same sound effects and one-liners constantly throughout the game and it will start to grate on you after a while. This isn’t a knock on MUA and more on this style of game in general.

Bottom Line

Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a pretty easy game to recommend. If you love comic books, and/or you are a big fan of the X-Men Legends games, you’ll find a lot to like here. It plays better, looks better, and packs a lot more gameplay and bonuses that the Legends games, so MUA is unquestionably the best entry in this series. It doesn’t make any huge changes to the formula, but it streamlines the experience quite a bit. My only concern is that, unless you are a die-hard comic book fan, you might not know most of the characters in MUA all that well. Unlike X-Men where we have had three movies and TV shows and tons of games, the extended Marvel universe hasn’t ever really been showcased for the general public. I think it can be a little bit harder to stay motivated when you don’t really know/care about the characters. This isn’t really a complaint, just something to consider. The bottom line, though, is that Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a very fun, very well put together game that comic book and action-RPG fans will love.