Before the Marvel movie explosion, licensed games based on Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s
creations were fairly commonplace. Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America and even
Wolverine got the video game treatment. Today, all we’ve got are the LEGO games. This is possibly due to the skyrocketing licensing costs as a result of the movies’ success, as well as the question of finding the right studios to make the games. Marvel games, after all, will now be competing with Rocksteady’s critically acclaimed Arkham series.
When it was announced last week at Comic Con that the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games
would be getting reissues on current generation consoles and PC, it caught everyone off
guard. It was a pleasant surprise, nonetheless, since it’s been a while since we’ve had a good licensed Marvel superhero game on the market.
Mike Jones, executive producer of the reissue didn’t promise the world, however. The reissue, he said, would sport slightly reworked UI and graphics. That was pretty much it, since the goal was to create versions which were going to be as faithful to the original games as possible. After spending several hours with both games on PlayStation 4, I can say that the developers have delivered on this promise—on console at least.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is an action-RPG—think of it as an oversimplified Diablo with superheroes from the Marvel universe. The game can be played either solo or in co-op, and while co-op (couch co-op in particular) infinitely ameliorates the experience, the game is tremendous fun when played solo as well. Players can pick up to four superheroes for their journey, switching between each seamlessly in the middle of combat. Each superhero has his or her signature abilities, with Captain America being able to throw his shield which ricochets and takes out multiple enemies, while Thor can rain death from above with his hammer—you get the picture. Ultimate Alliance 2 adds another layer of complexity with team attacks. For example, you can combo Cap and Iron Man, with Iron Man shooting a laser directly at Captain America’s shield, splitting the beam and creating multiple lasers of doom.
Both games have more in common with the stories from the comic books than the movies, with campy dialogue, over-the-top action and every effort made to squeeze in as many superheroes and villains into the wafer-thin plot as possible. Fortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing that makes Ultimate Alliance great. There are no compromises made in the use of the Marvel license, and we definitely get as much, if not more than we bargained for.
The reissues themselves are pretty good. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the first Ultimate Alliance performed rather poorly by today’s standards (but par for the time). Back in the day, players were treated to a whopping 20 frames per second on average, with the game plummeting to as low as 10-15 frames when run at 1080p on the PS3. The PS4 version is a 30-40fps game on average, peaking at 60fps when there’s not a lot going on. I’m not sure if there’s been a tonne of engine optimization that’s been done, but it’s clearly taking advantage of the superior PS4 hardware. Having said that, the inconsistent, varying frame rate in Ultimate Alliance can be off-putting at times, particularly given that it’s still a shabby looking game by today’s standards despite the visual improvements.
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