GameDome Blog

The Nintendo Wii gaming console has teamed up with Marvel to offer “Marvel Ultimate Alliance”, a very fine launch title for the popular new gaming console. Marvel Ultimate Alliance has been brought to us by the very same people who made the X-Men Legends 1 and 2 games several years ago. The story that this game uses is fairly basic, revolving around Doctor Doom from the Fantastic Four, who has assembled his “masters of Evil” with the intention of doing, well, evil. So the Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the greatest super heroes ever, are called together in order to end this reign of terror and to fight off the mad men. This is a fairly basic theme which is drawn from the Marvel themed comic books, which is where the most expansive stories are told. So this game actually has quite a bit of depth when it comes to enemies, characters and the various locales that are visited during the game. You will not necessarily be incredibly disappointed by the story line, but the experience you will have with this game is not quite as involved as with Tales of Symphonia so try not to expect something like that.

In Marvel Ultimate Alliance you are given a team of more than twenty different heroes that you can play as. As you enter certain scenarios, you are given the opportunity to choose four different team members to play as. Just like in X-Men Legends 2, you can combine many really interesting teams using each set of four heroes as they are given to you. As you progress through the game, you can use both basic melee attacks and super powers in order to gain experience for your characters so that they may level up. As your characters level up, you will receive points which can be spent on new abilities or to improve current abilities as well. For example, Spiderman has different web attacks which you can add to your repertoire or upgrade through the game. Storm also has an interesting set of abilities, including several different weather-related powers, and Wolverine is great for learning different ways to completely maul someone. Some of the abilities that these characters learn are defensive in nature or helpful in some other way, so you may want to focus your attention on strengthening other skills at least in the beginning. There are a lot of different upgrades which can be added for each character which makes it fun to customize each one as the game play progresses.

One advantage that only applies to the Wii version of this game is that you can use the “Wii mote” remote controller to equip the super powers to your characters at any time, and then can simply wave the Wii mote remote in order to activate the powers when you are ready to use them. Many of the basic attacks used in this game can also be done using the Wii mote, either by shaking, flipping or thrusting it during game play. The A button will work just fine for basic attacks, but varying your attacks helps to gain a better strategy. The game play for Marvel Ultimate Alliance is proof positive that great things can be done when you combine the Wii mote remote and the “nunchuk” controller.

If you have played this game on either the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, you may not be all together impressed by the graphics, because these other consoles have much improved frame rates and better looking graphics, but the graphics on the Wii definitely get the job done as long as you have a decently operating television. The graphics in this game are definitely much improved if you compare them to the older X-men Legends 1 and 2, though, so cut them a little bit of slack even if they do not meet your expectations.

Overall, this is a great game for anyone who enjoyed either X-men Legends 1, or X-men Legends 2, or anyone who enjoys Marvel in general. If you are not a big Marvel fan, this game is still worth renting because it offers a really great RPG experience even if you are not typically into RPG games.

© Copyright restricted to author worldwide!

Mary Murtha