Marvel Ultimate Alliance

The Good
There have been Marvel video games ever since 1982, when Atari owners guided a red and blue stick figure up something that vaguely resembled a building and pretended it was Spider-Man. There have been dozens of games since then with Marvel, or at least Spider-Man and the X-Men well represented on every generation of gaming hardware. Other characters haven't necessarily fared as well. Here we have twenty-seven Marvel heroes, eight of whom have never been playable in a video game before.

Ultimate Alliance is an exercise in Marvelous excess. You meet over a hundred NPCs, go to about twenty locations and generally get a tour of most of the Marvel Universe. You have trivia games, alternate costumes, team building, loads of dialogue, including unique conversation between characters that know each other and so on. It's also great for four-player fun, though less-so on the PSP now that the online servers are down. You would need friends with their own PSPs and copies of the game. I won't repeat everything I said in my Xbox 360 review.

The PSP gets a bunch of exclusive new content, perhaps to make up for being graphically the weakest version. You get four new characters, online stat-tracking (now down), several new simulator missions including a new survival category and three new game modes.

The characters are Hawkeye, Ronin, Captain Marvel and Black Widow, all of whom have been under-represented, if represented at all in previous games. This means the PSP comes with more characters than any other version save the gold edition on Xbox 360, which came out a lot later. Unlike the exclusive characters on other platforms, all of them have their own set of comic missions added and Hawkeye's contains a new villain: Swordsman.

The new survival missions are pretty cool. You pick a character, then get dropped into constantly spawning enemies and see how long you live. It's not as great without the online records, but they are great for leveling and unlocking costumes. Luckily, since you don't exactly beat these, you aren't required to get them to unlock Silver Surfer as the Act 2 one seems nigh-impossible to find.

The new modes are uber-hero, where you only play one character at a time instead of four, but their abilities are maxed out, hardcore, where dead characters stay dead and hardcore squad, where dead characters stay dead and you can't swap your roster around.

The Bad
While it's not the game's fault, the PSP is the least powerful platform MUA was released on (except GBA, but that wasn't really the same game) and suffers for it. For the most part, it doesn't look worse than other PSP games other than perhaps being too ambitious. However, there are some odd glitches, like white seems at polygon edges, and the game suddenly chugging while it loads for no apparent reason.

This also seems to be the buggiest version. At one point, Ronin, who can't fly, was left walking about 20 feet above the ground. For some reason, Hawkeye, Ronin and and Captain Marvel had no extreme moves until I used them in comic book missions, even though they were way past the levels where they were supposed to get them. Sometimes, my team would stand around picking their noses instead of helping me fight. Spider-Man occasionally decided to do a back-flip instead of his extreme move. The normally nigh-unkillable Wolverine became completely unkillable and couldn't take damage when I was doing survival once. I eventually fell to my death and held the record for survival on that map online. It suffers from many of the same problems as the other versions, too. Your allies can stay alive okay for the most part, but aren't very good at navigation. Mr. Fantastic nearly died against a spinning blade trap while I was playing hardcore mode and Dr. Strange did die when all my characters got stuck in a corner while fighting Grey Gargoyle.

The new content sounds great, but most of it suffers from half-assed implementation. None of the new comic book missions have any voice-over. All the others do. While Black Widow and Ronin are incorporated into various teams, Hawkeye and Captain Marvel aren't. Hawkeye should at the very least be in Avengers and weapon specialists as he is the the Xbox 360 version and Captain Marvel should be in air force, power platoon and alternate identities. Also, unlike the Xbox version, Hawkeye has a very weak extreme attack.

Uber-hero mode is far too uber for its own good. Instead of a team of four characters, you only have one, but they are level 99 and have their attributes maxed. This seems like a trade-off that could still make for an interesting game. This would be incorrect. Your uber-hero is considerably more powerful than your normal four heroes combined. I let three fire giants and two leapers mob Ghost Rider, who's one of the weaker characters as far as defense goes, and was unable to lose even a single pixel of health.

Hardcore mode is clearly just tacked on without rally being thought through. Characters don't some much stay dead if they die as stay dead if they die and then you save. If your whole squad dies, you are just restored at the last save point with everyone intact. If they have made the game auto-save on character death, or at least had you respawn at the last save point with all dead characters still dead if you lost everyone, this mode might be meaningful, but it isn't.

Speaking of extra content, clearly Moon Knight and Colossus were meant to be in this game and were cut at the last minute to get us to buy multiple versions. (I suppose it worked. I have this one and the 360.) They are selectable through a glitch and are more-or-less fully functional with unlockable costumes, team memberships and such. Half the new PSP characters don't even have team memberships. Here we have a game based on a broad swath of the Marvel universe which is based around building teams and you can't even play as Marvel's best-known team, the X-Men, outside a bug exploit in certain simulator missions because you only have three of them. It's ludicrous.

The Bottom Line
This remains a decent game and some of the new content is good, despite implementation problems. It definitely loses a lot just by losing the feature of having three friends sit on the couch with you and all playing together, but that wasn't really doable on this platform. The gameplay remains repetitive. I gave up on playing through all mode about one act into hardcore. It's good for a fan of Marvel minutia, but RPG enthusiasts will find the character-building elements oversimplified. If you know that both Natalia Romanova and Yelena Bolova have gone by the name Black Widow and are excited about the prospect of getting to play as both, this is a good game for you. Otherwise, you may be better off with another game or one of the other platforms.