Review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has it's moments. It doesn’t offer the same punch as the original but it still offers a few good hours of fun gameplay that unfortunately becomes slightly monotonous towards the end. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 takes the player through what Marvel calls The Civil War, where the public wants superheroes to register with the government which includes revealing their secret identities and answering to the military powers. At first you play as a set of superheroes that invade a foreign nation to stop the daughter of Dr. Doom. After a few missions, and an increasing number of heroes, you are presented with a choice to side with Pro- Registration or Anti-Registration. Depending on the side you choose, you will lose access to some superheroes during gameplay. For example, Captain America is Pro Registration and Iron Man is Anti-Registration. They will never be on the same side going forward. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has some big name Marvel characters (i.e. Spiderman, Captain America, and Iron Man, etc.), so if you are not 100% into the universe, you will recognize most of the main characters. This is fine, since the superheroes backstory takes a backseat to the action, which consists of flashy super powers, team-up attacks and boss battles.

Now this is where the game's strengths is also it's weakness. Beating up hordes after hordes of bad guys is fun at first but you'll soon realize that it is very formulaic: 1) walk into room 2), defeat bad guys ,3) defeat more bad guys with super powers and 4), defeat boss with Fusion power. Wash, rinse, and repeat for 12 levels. The levels are diverse but they do not overmuch in the way of variety to overcome the feeling of “I’ve seen this all before.” During some stages and superhero dialogue, you are presented with choices on how to responds to a question or a situation (i.e. Aggressive, Neutral or Defensive) but they do not influence much other than some dialogue and some additional achievements.. If you are a fan of the Marvel Universe and if you don't mind to quick beat ’em up with laser beamed, super strong, flying superheroes, then you most likely have already beaten MUA2 the required three times to obtain all the playable characters and their alternate costumes. Also it is a lot more fun when you have someone else to play the game with. At the time of this review, the online co-op is pretty dead but the game does offer local 4-player co-op action. The repetition becomes enjoyable when you have 3 other friends to compete against. All in all, this game does have some replayability to it, with the two factions, unlockable characters and costumes. If you are a fan of the Marvel Universe then this is a definite pick up. Otherwise, this isn't exactly something that you will keep in your collection and think that it should be taking up space in your library.

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