Review by: William Abner

The Marvel Ultimate Alliance series returns with the whimsically titled Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (MUA2). On many levels this is just an extension of the first game: you still take a team of four heroes on a top-down platforming romp through various missions beating the tar out of mutants, robots, soldiers and super villains. There’s very little thinking involved. It remains a game where you check your brain at the door and simply bask in the glory of watching Iron Man hover over the battlefield blasting everything that moves and Spidey pelting bad guys with web balls—over and over again until your thumb hurts.

The game is based on the Marvel Civil War storyline, wherein the good guys split off into two factions because of a new government policy about hero registration. It’s certainly an important topic worthy of hero discussion but I never did like the fact that heroes came to death blows over this and it makes just as little sense in the game as it did in the comics. Captain America viciously fighting Iron man just seems…wrong. More strange is that at the conclusion of the game you have the option of using villains such as Venom and Green Goblin, who fight alongside…Thing and Storm? Really? Doesn’t that break some fundamental law of hero-dom?

The story is somewhat silly and so is the fact that some heroes are even in the game at all. Look, Thor and Hulk are on a totally different level than some of the enemies you face. It’s Thor. He’s a god. It’s like how the Silver Surfer was playable in the original—cool hero but shouldn’t he be out saving the entire galaxy or something?

Regardless, you aren’t playing this for the story or for the shockingly forced dialogue with meaningless script choices so that it can be billed as an action RPG when it’s about 90% action and 10% RPG – you do get to assign skill points to powers and abilities; that’s the extent of the RPG stuff. You’re playing this to use cool powers to beat people up, right? In that regard, the game is a success.