E3: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Eyes On

This game has the distinct honour (I suppose) of being the first one we checked out for E3. Plus it also looks promising, so that's always nice. I had played a little bit of the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and it was a pretty tight action RPG. Unfortunately, I had burned out on the genre after the dozens of Diablo ripoffs came to PC and consoles. However, it's been a while now, so I was nicely ready for MUA2.

The game is set during Marvel's Civil War timeline. I'm not really up to scratch on my Marvel storylines, but I have at least heard of this one! As our presenter said, the civil war divides Marvel's heroes into two camps - those concerned with security, and those wanting to protect liberty. The clash is exemplified by the rivalry between Ironman and Captain America. One of the cutscenes we saw had the latter approach the former to shake his hand...but ended up electrocuting him, Joker-style. That Captain America, what an asshole.

The game features more superheroes than you can shake a stick at. You can make any combination of heroes to form your team of four - one example had Ironman working alongside Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Venom. The game is viewed from a mostly top-down perspective, staying in close to your team as wave after wave of bad guys come at you. Every hero has their own suite of normal and special attacks - so some have projectiles (such as webs for Spidey), while others have pounding melee moves (like Juggernaut).

"Fusion" powers are the major bullet point for MUA2. At any point during combat, you can team the character you're currently controlling with any of the others, to create a unique super move. Every character has a special move combo with every other character - so apparently that means there are more than 250 such moves in total. They look pretty cool, and seem nicely effective in clearing the area of enemies. One example is Wolverine and Ironman - put them together, and Ironman shoots a blast of energy at Wolvie, who uses his claws to deflect the beam onto multiple bad guys. Thor can summon a hurricane at any time, while Deadpool can lob grenades into it. The result is a concentrated, swirling mass of explosions. It looks like a fun addition, although I'm wary about how balanced they are - and if you keep on using the same combinations, it's still going to get stale. Hopefully the developers can create a good mix of normal and fusion attacks.

The real danger for this game - and this genre in general - is repetitiveness. The fusion attacks sound good, but I really hope the levels themselves are varied, and don't start getting tiresome towards the latter half of the game. We also didn't get a chance to go hands on ourselves, although the gameplay looked pretty similar to the first game.

If you're a Marvel fan, you'll probably dig the storyline. Overall, this thing looks polished - keep an eye out for more hands on time and our full review down the track!

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