Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Marvel Ultimate Alliance ::
by William the Bloody
Dr. Doom has assembled a formidable group of villains who collectively call themselves the Masters of Evil. All of the bigshots and underlings who normally would not associate are all teamed up, but to what end? A SHIELD facility is attacked, and a distress call is sent out to any heroes in the area for aid, and Thor, Captain America, Wolverine and Spider-Man fend off the bad guys. After this initial fight is done, Nick Fury asks the heroes to stay on as a team, a special task force in order to discover what the Masters of Evil are up to.
The Good: This game follows the X-men Legends game play model, and well, that's a kick ass model. At any save spot you can swap out characters from a selection of around twenty or so to create your own cross-Marvel super hero team! All four members of the Fantastic Four are there, as well as a selection of Avengers (Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, Spider Woman), some X-men (Ice Man, Storm, Wolverine), and some solo characters like Dr. Strange and Deadpool (?!). Following the X-men Legends 2 protocol, there are also various bonuses available if you play certain people on your team. These range from the obvious like the Fantastic Four and New Avengers, to the not so obvious like Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Black Panther and Storm yielding the "Double Date" line up, or Dr. Strange, Ghostrider, Blade, and Thor being the "Supernaturals." A cool new added feature to the ability to skin the characters (which I enjoy doing), is that now each skin carries different attributes which can help your character. So you can skin either based on looks, or based on which one gives better bonuses (re: increased power regeneration versus increased attack rating). Just like in X-men Legends 2, you can assign points to certain attack, boost, and debuff types to your character and choose from the list which ones you want to use (except for the "ultimate" attack, which is not changeable). I must say, they did a great job translating some of the characters' trademark moves to the game. Throwing Captain America's shield around is totally awesome. A lot of the bosses and mini bosses can be tricky, especially on your very first try, but they're not impossible. There are fun Marvel trivia games, one per "act", and they earn you experience points for correct answers, which can be obtained by talking to AI characters in the game is you are not familiar with Marvel back story. There are "Danger Room" training sessions available if you find them during gameplay, which are single character missions, and beating them unlocks a skin, which is the hardest one to earn, and I do believe that beating them all will unlock the Silver Surfer as a playable character, but I'm not that good at this game (yet). I also want to point out the great improvement on graphics. The cinematics are absolutely gorgeous (one at the start of each "act"), and even the "lesser" cut scenes are looking pretty good. In the X-men Legends games, they were kind of chunky looking, with blocky hands and whatnot, here the characters look pretty good, and have smooth movements. Now, if only they could get their lips to move during these segments... The voice acting is really well done, and so are the quality of the majority of the recordings (a very small few have a muffled sound to them). A great bit is when you beat the game, over the end credits you get to hear the Marvel characters in the recording booth working on their lines for the video game. It's pretty darn funny if you pay attention to it, like Deadpool's haiku about broccoli, and Mr. Fantastic's mispronunciation of "nucular."
The Bad: I thought it was too bad that we cannot store health and energy regeneration orbs for later use. If you come across some, you must use them immediately, and that kind of stinks. Also, I wish the coins would be automatically sucked into you when you got near them like the health and energy orbs. The coins sit in their spot until you actually touch them, and sometimes they drop in weird spots that are impossible to get (money is good because it is used to buy the bonuses allowed by the skins). Seriously, once I shattered a barrel and coins came out of it, except some of the coins actually landed inside a rock! Come on, now! Some of the single player training sessions are really darn hard to beat and get that skin! It's not enough that you beat it, you also have to earn a minimum number of points to get the skin, and that's where I'm having problems, anyway. But, hey, I guess I don't want it to be too easy.
I know this game has been out for some time now, but I wanted to have run through it a few times before reviewing it, just to see how well held up, and it certainly does! I'm presently on my third run through of this game, and I'm STILL not tired of it!
A+
