Marvel Ultimate Alliance Review (PC)

  When Marvel Ultimate Alliance was originally released a decade ago it was a dream come true for comic book fans. Featuring dozens of playable characters from Marvel's lengthy history and providing deep dives into the lore, it was both an incredibly fun brawler/RPG at a time where good licensed games were rare and a reference tome for comic nerds. With smart variations to the gameplay to keep the standard beat-'em-up formula from getting stale, hours of optional content, secrets, and unlockables, and near limitless replayability, every inch of the game was a testament to Raven's love and care to the modern mythology of Marvel. If only an inch of that care went into this re-release/remaster... whatever this is...

  If you were to look at the price of this game and the release date, you could reasonably assume all of the optional, platform specific content was included, the graphics were improved, maybe the entire game had been rebuilt from scratch in a new engine, or any combination of those. Proving the age old adage about assumptions true, none of that is present here. The only notable improvement to this re-release is an upscaled resolution, everything else is the same if not worse. If you looked at the game and took the more pessimistic, cynical attitude of a cashgrab that was rushed out the door to cash in on the current superhero craze that's riddled with bugs you're on the right track.

  Being a massive fan of Ultimate Alliance (previously playing the hell out of it on Xbox 360), I bought this more or less on blind faith the day it was available. It was almost comically broken; the very first button prompt (“Press 'A' to Start) didn't work. Figuring maybe you had to fiddle with some button mapping to sort out using a controller I went into the settings menu, and even that was a mess. Getting hung up on options, being unresponsive, it amounted to guesswork to get anything to register. To top it all off, the controller diagram used for the menu was the same one I was attempting to use: an Xbox One controller... so they went to the trouble of making that picture, but didn't bother trying to get past the first screen of the game using it. After some time fumbling with that, I switched to a wired Xbox 360 controller that I keep handy for playing older games with similar issues with modern hardware, and it worked fine. Good for me (?), but this isn't an excusable issue in 2016.

  The game itself is still amazing! Part '90s arcade brawler, part Diablo dungeon crawler RPG, and a lengthy, epic cosmic story that is constantly escalating in scope, Marvel Ultimate Alliance is dumb fun defined. Like a good Saturday morning cartoon it's unapologetic in it's absurdity. From fighting a dragon on a giant heli-carrier, to battling mermen in Atlantis, going to Hell to fight demons, and to Asgard to save Thor and Friends, the variety in locations and enemies is inspired. While the core loop of punching people in the face to level up so you can punch more people in the face is present, there are just enough loops thrown at you to keep it from getting stale. There are some simplistic puzzles to solve, platforming challenges, then there's Murderworld where you're tasked with playing fully realized versions of Pitfall and Breakout. You can take a break from the main game at mission hubs where you can talk to a large cast of NPCs to flesh out the story or answer hundreds of obscure Marvel trivia questions for bonus XP. There is a lot of game here, and it's all worth experiencing.

  A big chunk of the side content of the game is trying to complete Simulation Missions: one off scenarios for either your team or a specific hero that are unlocked by finding collectibles scattered around the main game. Not only are these missions nice breaks from the story, they are a great way to level up your team and are how you unlock certain costumes for them. Oh, and they're broken in this version. Not only will most of them cause the game to crash consistently, but once it even deleted a couple of my saves. So that was cool...

  Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a classic game, but this version is riddled with asterisks. The only thing you can currently do without holding your breath and hoping the game doesn't crash is play through the main story. There are no extras here, and there's actually more content in the original release (*DLC characters are “coming” at the time of writing). The joke of controller support has been more or less fixed (*except when you have to press a key on the keyboard on the upgrade screen), but let's not forget that it was an issue on release, and this wasn't an Early Access game. So if you can take all of that nonsense into account, swallow the price tag, and you're still interested you have a great game waiting for you... a couple patches down the road.