Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

If you get the strongest feeling of deja vu while playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, don't worry. It's probably not a supernatural occurrence or a glitch in the Matrix, you've probably just played Marvel Ultimate Alliance before. Or X-men Legends. Or X-men Legends 2.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is the latest sequel in the beat-em-up/dungeon crawler game based on the Marvel Universe. You select a team of four heroes (for the most part... there are a couple of villains thrown in the mix to choose from) and use their unique powers and abilities to take down hundreds of generic baddies and the occasional notable boss characters. But instead of playing through an original storyline, you'll play through a slightly modified version of Marvel's blockbuster miniseries, Civil War.

Other than the storyline, Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn't really bring much new to the table. Even most of the roster is lifted from the original Ultimate Alliance as 17 out of the 24 playable characters appeared in the first game. In fact, in some areas, I feel as if the game has taken a few steps back from it's predecessors. As you develop your characters, you can gain new abilities and increase their stats, but whereas the previous games gave you the freedom to pick and choose which abilities you wanted to use, Ultimate Alliance 2 gives you two abilities to start with and two to learn when you reach a certain level... for a total of four (Two plus two equals four! Thank you, Sesame Street!) abilities that are chosen for you and always active.

And while you can earn new costumes for your characters, there's only one additional costume per character and unlike the original game, the new costumes don't effect gameplay and are purely cosmetic. Some of the costumes are better than others... I'd totally use Captain America's World War 2 costume from the Ultimates or Spider-man's Stark designed Iron Spider costume. But Gambit as a Twilight reject from his time as one of Apocalypse's horsemen? Yeah, I think I'll pass.

One of the new gameplay offerings in Ultimate Alliance 2 is the use of "fusion attacks". You initiate a fusion attack with two of the characters on your team to take out rooms of baddies or take a chunk out of the lifebar of a boss character. Forms of the fusion attacks are available in the previous games, but before, they almost required you to be playing co-operatively with a friend. Now, you can easily pull them off by yourself... if you have no friends.

One of the things that intrigued me about the game early on was the Civil War storyline. In Civil War, the heroes are split into two factions because of the Superhuman Registration Act. And in the game as in the story, you're forced to choose which side you want to play on about halfway through, either pro-registration or anti-registration. When playing through the first time, I picked anti-registration and was impressed by some of the scenarios, most notably a particular boss fight (which I won't spoil here). I was eager to play the pro-registration side to see what other campaigns I had missed. Unfortunately, the two missions on both sides are nearly identical... even down to that particular boss fight.

There are a lot of people out there who are divided on Koei's Dynasty Warriors series. Some people hate the games because it's essentially the same game over and over again. Some people love the games because it's essentially the same game over and over again. I feel Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is probably going to fall in the same boat. The game doesn't really innovate in a lot of ways and in a lot of ways it's the previous game wrapped in better graphics and a new storyline. But if you liked the core gameplay of X-men Legends and Ultimate Alliance, chances are you'll like Ultimate Alliance 2.

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