As those who know me know, I'm a fan of the co-op game experience; I like finding and playing games that I can play while sat down next to a friend. On the whole, Marvel Ultimate Alliance turns out to be a pretty fun multi-player/co-op game experience, but has some critical flaws that marr the experience.
First and foremost, I have to say, availability of this game was poor. I don't know why - some kind of printing snafu, god knows what, but getting my hands on this game was difficult for no apparently good reason. The local GAME was out of stock, as was it turns out the whole chain; Amazon was estimating delivery in 1-2 weeks.
Fortunately, Virgin Megastores, ever the trusty supplier, had 20 copies. Good to see that someone has us poor last-minute chumps in mind and sees fit to stock up.
The positives - and there are plenty - include being able to unlock multiple 'versions' of a given hero; my favories for ages have been Thor and the whole midgard storyline; so we're playing through as the Avengers team, and I've got the classic Thor outfit to kick around in. Pete, playing as Iron Man, is currently in the War Machine outfit. It's a touch of authenticity, a way to reach out to comic book readers who followed the older comic representations of their heroes, and not just the current version. There are changes to bonus powers that go with the suits to help out with the representation, and it all hangs together really well.
It supports up to four players local; which was nice, when a friend came over and we could just hand over a third controller (Thanks, Kotaku! That third controller finally had a use! Can't remember what I won it for, probably some smart-ass comment that they deemed worthy to reward me with swag for.) and in he went.
There are four negatives. The first became really obvious when that third player came in, and it's been sticking out like a sore thumb ever since. Orchestration. You're all locked on one screen; so trying to get three people to all move in the same direction is... well, it's awfully reminiscent of Gauntlet. It also becomes instantly obvious that the game gets harder to play the more people you add, because you spend more time trying to figure out which guy is the guy you're controlling (the underwater level in Atlantis is especially poor for this, as the moment you're off the ground the ring at your feet vanishes). Multiplayer feels almost like an afterthought, in some ways; the visual cuing is just too poor.
The second negative is some pretty bad scripting in the "in-between" stuff. The levels that represent the non-combat story interspersed through the rest of the game feel tacked on, have a plethora of bugs, and don't always properly pick up on the fact that you've completed various elements. This can be disappointing - returning from a long mission to find out that the quest zone is bugged doesn't make you relish running around completing those quests; finding out later that they have zero impact doesn't help.
Third is a... configurable birth defect in the game. The AI's ability to upgrade its own skills is fine and dandy - but the game's willingness to pick things up and auto-sell any items of power it happens to find on fallen villains is criminal. Some of those items are too useful to just dispose of in the way that the AI is so happy to do - you can't ever buy them back - and losing the first few items in the game because it's "auto-equipping" is criminal. Also, there's rumors around the net, and one can see why, that people just "forgot" that they can level up their characters' skills - which is undoubtedly why this auto-equipping/auto-skilling AI was created in the first place; however, what they *ought* to have done was have actual level-up UI...
Which brings us to the fourth, and last problem, the UI. Laden with pointless sounds and swooshy effects and shiny polish but completely and utterly uselessly designed; it's button hell, designed to show lots of useless information but make ordinary and common tasks a nightmare to perform. The inability to tell the difference between something that requires one point or two, or skills that suddenly expect money instead of points but with no obvious visual cueing... It's all just a big strap-on afterthought, a rubber representation of what the real thing ought to have been. The UI for managing your team is the biggest let-down in the game, failing to do what it ought to - make the parts you have to do often easy to get at and play. It could have been so easy to just wizard away most of those UI choices, and to improve the dependency on buttons that the current set entails; instead, it is all too easy to accidentally hit the wrong button and sell something on one screen which, on a different screen, does nothing permanent. Poor control layout, poor UI structure, poor command and control, and no concept whatsoever of use case optimisation. It's a poster child for hiring UI designers.
So there's good. And there's bad. And the UI definitely qualifies as ugly.
It's tough, because it has so much potential; and we're still enjoying playing through the game. However, to be honest, if I had another good co-op that he was willing to play in hand, we'd be doing so by now. The game is good as an experience but the negatives would have made us move on, if there were anything to move on to, and we're only halfway through the campaign.
I wanted so much to like it, but the negatives are oppressive, and made worse by being needlessly so; it would have been so easy to get this part right, it represents such a small part of the game compared to the huge amount of content and engine work that went into making such a pretty and enjoyable experience. But the devil, as they say, is in the details - and that devil is running rampant all over this title, unchecked and uncompromising in its ability to turn a great game into just a mediocre one.
Better luck on the next title. X-Men Legends 1 and 2 were the previous incarnations of the engine, and things are clearly getting better. I have high hopes that they'll continue to learn from their mistakes, and maybe even hire someone who gives a damn about user experience. TOG on gaming, anyone?
I really wanted to give this game a higher rating. I just... I just can't. That's what bugs me most. The parts that they got right deserve better than two stars; the parts they didn't are just too big to allow it.
