While it is not as together as it's predecessor, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 delivers everything its promised
User Rating: 9 | Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 X360
Ever since the original X-Men Legends game back in 2004, I have loved this series. It is fairly young, cracking in at only 4 games now considering the amount of story it has to pull from, so there hasn't been too many back aspects of the games, and out of all 4, none of them have been bad themselves. The original Legends compares a little more to this than X-Men Legends 2 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, as it's constant glitches can get quite annoying. Nothing that really makes you unable to complete the game, but a few time I found myself having to re due levels over and over due to the game's inability to keep up with the number of enemies on screen, as well as its glitchy save system that doesn't truly auto save when it says it does. Other glitches include one that will constantly set Autospend: On, no matter how many times you shut it off. It's not all that bad, but if you enjoy the RPG elements, upgrading their abilities is one of the few that still exist from previous titles and the Autosave glitch likes to take even that away from you. The graphics are better then the original, and miles ahead of the X-Men Legends game and it makes me really happy that I can finally see the character's faces and bodies compared to other games with their cell shading. I prefer the more realistic graphics over the cell shading any day. The number of characters playable is amazing, clocking in at 25, including the Juggernaut pre-order. Currently, their will be 5 additional characters to be added as downloadable content, which will bring the total to 30, which is down from the original Ultimate Alliance. 30 is definitely satisfying, but I really enjoyed the fact that on the Xbox360, there were a total of 33 with downloadable content. I also enjoyed the game's tracking system that clocked in you total time playing each character, as well as total kills with each character, so you can find out who is your most played character is. Myself, my most played character is Storm, with over 5 hours at the moment, with Jean Grey coming in a close second. It's not surprising at all, considering in the original, Storm was also my most played character, but it's nice to be able to know that officially. The much hyped fusions are a bit of a let down however. While they are all enjoying to watch, they all start to look exactly the same, as the game basically uses a copy-and-paste method, with each character just putting their own spin on it. So, unique (as the developers called them), is not exactly the right word for it. The story itself is particularly good for a video game, but one thing that I really didn't like about it, was the game's decision to end the Civil War at about 2 hours before the game ends, finishing it out with a generic entity possessing the heroes. The reason for this was the developers wanting to reunite the alliance for the end, but it's pretty much unanimous that everyone wanted to have either Captain America or Iron as their final boss, instead of Nick Fury superimposed with the powers of NPC heroes. Despite not liking him as a boss, I did enjoy playing Nick Fury in this game much more then the original, as he holds the combined powers of A-Bomb, Firestar, Multiple Man, Bishop, Havok and Electro, but I would have preferred to play as some of those characters, like Firestar, Multiple Man and Havok themselves, and not just using their powers. The characters are important too. The game ultimately boils down a satisfying experience that could have been much better. Still, the game did leave a lasting impression on me, and was a lot less generic then the previous games in the series. Definitely worth all the money I paid it for.
