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 2 ::
by William the Bloody
Dr. Doom is presumed dead. In his absence, Latveria held democratic elections and Lucia Von Bardas was elected Prime Minister. She has gone out of her way to improve relations with the USA and other foreign nations, but Nick Fury discovers that this has all been to cover up her embezzling funds to the Tinkerer and his supplying super villains with advanced tech and armor. When Fury finds out he is outraged and assembles a small strike force (Captain America, Wolverine, Iron man, and Spider-Man) to infiltrate Castle Doom and take down the terrorist organization. In the aftermath, it is discovered that Nick Fury's invasion of Latveria was not sanctioned by the government, and has had a trickle-down effect on how society in general views super-powered crime fighters. It will only be a matter of time before the government is forced to take action and then everyone will have to choose a side: pro-government only heroes, or opposed in support of heroes continuing to act as free-agents. What side will YOU choose?
The Good: Once again, they have maintained the X-men Legends gameplay model, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Such a fun set up. There have been changes, of course. The last game (if memory serves) had red orbs for health healing, blue orbs to replenish stamina (the meter that allows for use of powers), and gold coins to buy boosts. This game has done away with the need for blue orbs, instead allowing your characters to naturally replenish stamina over time, which is awesome. Instead of money, they have white orbs with which you can buy boosts, and they must have gotten my letters because they get automatically sucked into your character and no longer just sit there like the coins in the first game did. Which was bad. So yay! Earning your change of skin is a little easier, this time you only have to defeat 50 enemies after choosing a side in the superhuman registration conflict, which is not so hard. The training room simulator is now for your entire four person team as opposed to being single character/player missions only, which I find to be a more fun improvement. Another cool thing is that you can save AND change character almost any time you want, as opposed to the last game where you could only do these things at certain save spots. All you have to do is pause the game and you can swap characters, modify them, save, and more. I like that they still allow you to "keep" your leveled up characters after beating the game which lets you start again from the begining with beefed up characters. Really nice. More on this specific game (as opposed to comparing it to Ultimate Alliance 1): they did a pretty nice adaptation of the comic stories "Secret War" and "Civil War", uniting them in a fluid story and then expanding upon it in their own way. It was an interesting idea to have us, the players, need to choose a side in the registration conflict, yielding in different sorts of missions. Well, more on the nose is that they are the same missions, just from the different side. As an example, say SHIELD is transporting anti-registration superhumans to prison. If you are PRO registration, you need to protect the convoy, if you are ANTI registration, you attack the convoy. You also operate out of different base locations and can have different NPC interactions depending where you are and who you're playing while you're there. They really did go the extra mile in character interactions with this. They had the every voice actor record their character's take on certain lines because the scene you saw would show the character you were playing interacting with, say, the villain you just defeated, which also means they had to animate that same scene like twenty times, too. And speaking of which, the animation is so improved! The character interaction parts have moving mouths! Hooray! The full on cut scenes are quite gorgeously animated, too. They rather streamlined the briefings (no characters, but animated computer files, ie building schematics etc), but they still look good and are well designed and I imagine this freed them up to double their efforts in other places, which is fine. The bosses were just the right mix of relatively easy and difficult bad-ass, but I found the final boss to be easier than he ought to be, in my opinion.
The Bad: Unfortunately, there were quite a few changes to this version versus the last one that I thought were steps in the wrong direction. There seemed to be far fewer characters from which to choose, and not nearly as wide a variety, ie no Dr. Strange, Ghostrider or Black Panther. As opposed to FOUR skins for each character, there are now only TWO. What the hell, right? I have a personal problem with the idea that pausing the game takes you to the game menus. I like to be able to pause a game and take a second to look over the gaming situation. Sometimes the action is happening too fast and I want to pause to look the screen over and decide what angle I ought to attack from next. This is impossible to do when they take your gaming screen away and force you onto the menus. Grrrr! And don't get me started on the menus! They are NOT VERY intuitive! For starters, the character selection menu makes you have to scroll through all of the characters one at a time to find the one you want. Ultimate Alliance ONE allowed you to select the character you wanted by picking it out of a single, group line up, easy peasy. Sometimes all that character scrolling is quite time consuming and always very annoying! They have also taken away the number of different super powers characters have. In Ultimate Alliance 1, there was a selection of powers available and you could pick 3 out of the 4 you wanted and to what buttons you wanted to assign them. Not so here. Now they have four powers only and they are preassigned to certain buttons. Granted, they were pretty consistent on each characters types of attacks being assigned to the same buttons (projectiles (where applicable) to X and radial to O for example), but it was still nice having the ability to choose which attacks you liked/wanted to use at what time (because you could always switch them out at a later time, see. not any more). Another drawback is that a handy feature of the last game was the ability to hop around to all the previous save points and re-walk through levels, handy if you realize you forgot to pick up a rare item or something. You can no longer do that. I never thought I'd be lamenting the loss of save spots, but there you go. Do you know what else, the game overall ran pretty short. Even though you really "have" to play it twice through to get the "whole" story, it STILL feels short. Now the biggest thing. And this is SERIOUS. Not nit-picky or personal preference based issues here. I HAVE NEVER PLAYED A GAME SO BUGGY IN MY LIFE! Seriously, how could they release this to the public in such a state? I'd have rather waited a few more months and have a bug-free game, thanks! My first run through was relatively problem free, but my second was AWFUL. I had to reset the game (and one time the entire console) no less than FOUR TIMES. The first time, an automatic door would not open, which in essence would not allow for me to proceed in the level. I restarted the level and did not have this problem again. The second time I was fighting a boss, Lady Deathstrike, and she just stopped moving and was invulnerable. Nothing I did to her caused a reaction and her health did not deplete. I restarted from my last save point and was fine. Then, for no reason at all, my entire screen TURNED GREEN. The game would not respond, but the Playstation menu was accessible, so I quit the game and restarted it and it didn't happen again. And finally, the whole game froze in the middle of melee combat and the entire game and console would not respond at all. I had to turn off my Playstation completely and turn it back on again. This.... should NOT happen!!
Overall, the game was short and not perfect, but still super fun. I was happy with many of the changes but mostly just glad my favourite characters to play, Storm and Ms. Marvel, were still included. They can kick everyone's ass simultaneously and look good doing it. The Civil War angle is a very clever ploy to make you WANT to play this game again, immediately after beating the first time (and it works). If you're a fan of Marvel superheroes, you will love this game!
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