When you start a new game of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, it feels like a comic book come to life. Amazing cinematic are action packed and with pretty good voice acting. As a long time Marvel fan, the nostalgia started to come back in waves. However, once you are fully exposed to all that is Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, the nostalgia is just not as strong as it should have been.

We Begin Our Story
M:UA starts with Thor, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Wolverine being called in by Nick Fury to save a devastated SHIELD ship from further attack. It turns out that the attack stems from Doctor Doom starting a new alliance of the most powerful super villains in the world for—what all villains want—world domination. Since a majority of super villains across respective stories appear, the heroes who oppose those villains also show up at various points in the game, making the battle seemingly a classic Marvel battle of good versus evil. Unfortunately, the premise is much stronger than what the gameplay actually delivers.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance bills itself as an Action RPG, which it is. It has leveling up elements, party A.I. tactics, hit points, and the usual suspects for an RPG. These elements are all easy to access and utilize. It’s the manner in which they are implemented that keeps M:UA from reaching its full potential. The RPG elements are ordinary at best—kill a ton of enemies, earn a level up. Along the way, you see various stat increasing items, thinking that game is really built more towards RPG than it is action. Actually, it’s just the opposite—random button mashing gets you very far in this game, further than it really should. Melee combos are simple to use and enemies fall before the most common ones. You’d also think that you need a balanced party and that stat building items should be shared equally—but you can actually just focus on building up your chosen hero and never look back. Their default level up is enough to hang with you and kill enemies as necessary.

Will The Heroes Save The Day?
Your party members actually don’t handle much differently from one another. Handling back and forth between Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, and Wolverine feels identical—give or take for the presence of some abilities. As a matter of fact, the only element that separates them is their different special moves. Spider-Man does not climb on walls or use webbing to the party’s advantage. Wolverine can’t claw through anything. These are all little touches that could’ve added depth to a very shallow Action RPG. When you have a whole party of alleged superheroes that don’t use their special abilities for anything but melee combat, it sort of takes the sparkle out of the Marvel experience. The lack of micromanagement—or any type of management, really—for your party also takes the RPG completely out of the game and makes M:UA little more than a hack-and-slash with slight depth. Online offers the exact same experience, but with some variety and not the depth you’d expect from a game that has support for four players at a time. Playing with a friend who’s into Marvel will definitely earn M:UA some mileage in your collection.

Speaking of gameplay, one hindering and frustrating facet of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is that it shares a common presentation issue that is growing in next-gen games: lack of SDTV support. Dead Rising and Madden NFL ’07 for Xbox 360, the small text was bad enough—but in M:UA, it’s almost unreadable in certain places and I’m nearsighted. Now, for the real hindering facet of the game—being locked out of the leveling up and party swap menu because less than five percent of the leveling/party swap menu is visible at the bottom. Owning a smaller SDTV makes appreciating the RPG elements of M:UA even more imperceptible than usual. When a gamer can’t see the leveling menu of an RPG, something has got to change. The lack of SDTV support in newer games is becoming abysmal. Someone needs to tell gaming developers that just because a game has high definition support, doesn’t mean that you’re gaming on an HDTV.