Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Horror Games Review

Compare at: $59.99 (New)
Buy Now: $46.99 (New)

You Save: $13.00 (22%)

Add to Cart

Title: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Format: Video Game
Score:
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Activision Inc.
Hits: 8

Review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

[ Back to Homepage | Back to Horror Game Reviews Index ]

HellHorror.com not responsible for reviews/comments and they may be removed at any time.

Comments for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

• Posted on 2009-11-09
  Brainless Button Masher
  
  This followup offers nothing the original didn't already have. A horribly generic sound track, less than D list voice acting, last generation graphics, very little interaction with your surroundings, and a never ending / never rewarding style of button mashing game play. It feels more like a Gameboy game that was brought to a bigger platform with no improvements or enhancements. I know there are people who enjoy this style of game, I'm just not one of them.
  
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
• Posted on 2009-11-04
  Best Marvel/X-Men Game Ever
  
  Way back in 2004 when X-Men Legends was first released, I had a great time pulverizing all kinds of baddies thanks to Storm and Jean Grey. They were so powerful that by the end of the game Jean's attacks would kill enemies who weren't even on the screen yet. That game was the best thing to happen to me in all of 2004. Period.
  
  Recent years saw wimpy installments like X-Men Legends II and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, both of which scaled down the power of those two and were totally lame due to the lack of carnage that any individual hero could do.
  
  Marvel Ultimate Alliance II, however, allows the player to really utilize the power of those two heroines. Chain lightning hasn't been this fun since 2004, and neither have psionic powers.
  
  Also, Alliance II does a great job of actually making the player make choices that affect the story and character development. Conversation answers lead to attack or defense boosts, players must decide which side of a civil war they will fight on, etc.
  
  Overall, this is the best Marvel or X-Men game made to date, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in using powerful meta-humans to defend the world from various evil plots.
  
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
• Posted on 2009-11-03
  Not a great game, but good co-op fun.
  
  Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is a pretty fun party game. I went through the game with 2 players in co-op, and completed both storylines. For the second playthough, the game offers a "Legendary" difficulty which is sort of a New Game+ option where you keep your levels but get a correspondingly higher difficulty. I had a pretty good time, but I have to admit that it's an experience with plenty of flaws that could turn some players off.
  
  Let's just get this out there- if you're not playing this game in co-op, you're only getting a fraction of fun. This title does have numerous flaws, but most of them are outweighed by the fun of stomping around with a group of friends. Playing alone, this is only a mediocre title. Playing with four friends, this is an absolute party. I would consider at least 2-player co-op an absolute must for this title. You can play it alone, but really, try not to.
  
  The gameplay essentially consists of mashing buttons with some RPG elements overlaid to allow you to customize your heros. However, strict level requirements mean that the customization rarely goes farther than scaling back the one power you least like to make sure the other 3 are as high as they can go. You can leave the auto-spend option on and there's very little gameplay difference.
  
  You get to build your own team of heros, but there's a lot of problems here too. There's a pretty good stable of characters (23?), but this feels very constrained. Consider the Civil War storyline, and many characters will be unavailable due to picking sides. Thor and Hulk require collecting items, and Juggernaut is pre-order only. You'll really only have about a dozen characters to select from on your first playthrough. There are times in the game when you'll be hard-pressed to find healing tokens, so any character with a slim health bar is a major liability. Spider-Man and Storm for instance are both great fun to play, but bosses can KO them very nearly in one hit. Personally, I kept to tanks and regenerating characters (Wolverine, Deadpool), and I still had several instances where I had to wander around praying for health drops. (Random note: Hulk and Thor have to be unlocked, but there's a code you can input to unlock them at the start without hurting your game. I recommend this very highly- look it up).
  
  The game length is fairly short- even if you're really searching for all the items and spending a lot of time checking out bonus materials, I'd only expect 20 hours from the main story. You can replay the game, but 90% of the game is the same, with less than a handful of really unique maps per side. You're really only going to replay mostly for the few characters you missed out on based on the story choices, and as said, that's pretty limited anyway. And the story isn't great. Sure, it's fun comic fare with a few twists, but it doesn't even stay true to the Civil War storyline. This is not a spoiler for the game (although it is a spoiler for the comics)- in the comics, Capt. America actually dies at one point. In the game, that never happens. That event isn't changed or sidestepped, it actually does not happen at all. For all the hype about this storyline, it's puzzling as to why it isn't even carried through. The whole plot is basically generic and forgettable. Not bad, but not great.
  
  A final note is on the art. As a whole, the game has pretty good graphics. Again, not great but good. There's a lot of puzzling choices for character design though. Spider-Man appears in his modern form that everyone's familiar with, but Gambit appears to be some sort of Xtreme (and really terrible) version. Most every character has an alternate costume, and Spider-Man's alternate is his Tony Stark costume- if you're not a comics fan, you probably have no idea what this is, and it suffices to say this outfit had very mixed reaction from fans. Meanwhile, Venom's alternate costume is just a different art style, but Hulk's costume is the Red Hulk, which is technically a different character entirely. Things just feel really slapdash all over on this account- the artists really needed to settle on one era or aesthetic and apply it across all of the game. It's fun to have some options for the costumes, but often you're just praying the alternate costume is the "real" character design they should have used in the first place. (For fans- Jean Grey appears in her Phoenix outfit, but changes to her classic era X-Men outfit... where's modern Jean Grey?).
  
  So in the end, you have a mediocre game with some really fun multiplayer, and a lot of simple fun with selecting some of your favorite heros and stomping around the battlefield. If you've got some friends or a significant other to play this game with, it's a fully enjoyable co-op experience that's definitely worth owning. I'm sure there will be a downloadable pack with extra characters in the near future, and that could add even more fun to the mix. If you're going to be playing this one solo, it's really rental territory or a low-priority buy. You'll play it once, maybe twice for the other side of the conflict, and forget it.
  
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
• Posted on 2009-10-26
  lots of fun, a little too short and doesnt follow the storyline
  
  pros - good cast of characters, lots of fun trying out different team combinations and fusion attacks.
  
  cons - the game is too short, doesnt follow the story line from the comics, TERRIBLE camera position/control.
  
  i enjoyed this game alot, and have been playing it thru a second time. i wish there were some better camera control/positions (its a bit too far away from the action), and i wish it followed the comic story better - they completely gutted captain america's story to simplify the game, which made it seem... too simple and unmomentus. more should have been going on to show the impact of what was happening in the story. but really, the camera thing is the biggest problem - its always too far away from the action.
  
  despite its flaws, i still recommend it. it was alot of fun and has replay value, and the character cast is alot of fun to explore.
  
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
• Posted on 2009-10-23
  It's a mediocre game.
  
  This game is cool because of the mass super hero aspect. But, the graphics were poor and the view of the game is overhead and far away. Also, the story line is slow and hard to get into. It's just not my kind of game.
  
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10