Marvel Ultimate Alliance was the dream game of any comic book fan, as it included tons of Marvel characters in the same game, all playable. However, the dream was cut short by lackluster gameplay and bad design choices. The sequel, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, tries to correct many of those errors, and, for the most part, it succeeds. But by focusing too much on fixing what was broken, they forgot to do something equally important: add something new.

The story of Ultimate Alliance 2 is based on two Marvel stories, Civil war and Secret War, and if you’re into Marvel comic books, you’ll know exactly what it is. For the rest of us, the game does a good job of setting it up, which basically goes like this: the Government wants super heroes to legally register, which splits the super heroes into two factions, those for and those against. The player has the liberty to chose either side, which means you can play the campaign as both sides, twice, which is a great way of adding replay value.

The gameplay is essentially the same; a lot of running and fighting (read: button mashing) where you control one character and the three others are AI controlled, or, if you’re lucky, you get get three friends to join in co-op. As standard, each hero has a pair of melee attacks and four power attacks. But the most fun thing is that you can switch between super heroes on the fly, so if you get tired by playing as one hero, you always have a choice. You can also combine one of your powers with the power from another teammate, and create a very powerful “fusion attack”, which pretty much obliterates everything around you.

However, despite the amount of super heroes to chose from, the combat is always essentially the same; which is the worst kind of gameplay mechanic possible: button mashing. There’s little tactic involved, and the AI rarely challenges you to think beyond selecting the order in which to kill them. After a few hours, perhaps even less, the whole thing becomes repetitive, only to be broken apart by cut scenes, which offer a story where you have three choices to act, an aggressive, a neutral and a diplomatic choice, each affecting the story’s progress. However, the writing and suiting of the lines of your choices are quite poor, and oftentimes won’t make sense to the question you’re presented with.

Technically, the game doesn’t look noticeably better than the predecessor, which certainly wasn’t one of the best looking games out there. Textures are low res and look washed out, and the animations become too predictable and scripted at times. If there’s too many enemies on the screen at the same time, the frame rate will show a drop and there are more bugs overall than one would accept of a fully priced title. Overall, the game will satisfy hard core Marvel and comic book fans, but for the rest of us, there’s really no reason to spend $60 on a game like with this many shortcomings, the most serious of which is the repetitive combat, which is a shame, because the campaign is playable in two different ways.

The Good:
Dual-campaigns
Co-op is well done

The Bad:
Repetitive gameplay
Too much button mashing
Bland visuals
Frame rate and bug issues

Overall score: 5/10