AMN was recently invited to an exclusive press event at Activision’s headquarters in Santa Monica to get a full day of hands-on play with their upcoming lineups for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PSP, DS, and Wii. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was the first title that we played; and it seems to looking on track to provide a solid experience on each of the 360, PS3, and Wii consoles.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance lets you form a team of four superheroes from the Marvel universe to do battle against a variety of thugs, robots, creatures, and super villains. There are more than 20 playable characters to select from when assembling your team, and they can be mixed and matched in countless ways to play off the strengths of each other. Certain combinations, like using all four members of the Fantastic Four in a single team, will gain special power-up bonuses; but the real strategy is in finding the combination of heroes that suits your play style best. We found that mixing some close range fighters like Wolverine or Colossus with flying characters like Storm and an elemental character such as Iceman or The Human Torch will give you the best results.

Because you can change your teams at marked points in the levels, special situations may encourage you to swap out a character or two for another to give yourself an advantage. One of the stages in the demo was full of enemies that had a resistance to ice attacks, so we had to make sure that Iceman sat that mission out.

Even though you are allowed to swap your characters out quite often, the game rewards you for sticking to a set team as much as possible. The longer your team stays together, you start to gain teamwork bonuses that help your characters to level up quicker and learn new abilities.

Your characters earn skill points as you defeat enemies and bust up destructible environments. These skill points can be spent on upgrades to abilities that your characters have learned. You can have these points spent automatically to ensure that they are dispersed evenly, or you can have them applied manually to better suit your play style.

The game’s battle systems on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions were nearly identical. While the PS3 offered a couple of differences in execution with its tilt features, it wasn’t used to a great extent. You have light attacks, strong attacks, combos, the ability to grab enemies, jumps, and special moves specific to each character. You can chain together combos by mixing light attacks and strong attacks that will often send your opponent flying up into air, dizzied, or slammed to the ground. Learning these combos is a necessity when you are faced with multiple enemies and you need to take them down quickly to avoid taking a lot of damage. Timing your attacks and combos to coincide with your team members helps you to gain damage bonuses and deal out massive amounts of pain quickly. Just as in the comic books that these characters are pulled from, teamwork is the key to properly defeating your enemy and ensuring success.

As mentioned earlier, special attacks are learned over time by gaining skill points. To use them, however, requires filling your special attack meter by defeating enemies and causing destruction. Once again, coordinating these special attacks with your teammates is a great strategy when trying to bring down enemies quickly.

At this point the gameplay in Ultimate Alliance is similar other top-view beat ‘em up games, but it manages to feel much more satisfying with all of the teamwork elements that are emphasized. The game is definitely leagues ahead of what can be found in its predecessors, such as X-Men Legends or Gauntlet in regards to satisfying combat, boss encounters, and variety of gameplay. One boss fight we played involved taking down an enemy that was at least 50 feet tall and made use of some QTE button presses to bring him down; similar to how enemies are finished off in God of War. The 360 versions used a series of button presses at certain times while the PS3 and Wii versions used a series of motions combined with buttons. According to the developers, more of these types of encounters can be expected in the final product of the game and are a great way at adding variety to the standard beat ‘em up formula.


What a flamer

The fighting styles and moves are faithful to the long-standing comic traditions. Captain American tosses his shield, Spider-Man makes use of his webs in a variety of ways, The Thing smashes everything, The Silver Surfer zips around the screen, and all other characters play in a way that you envision they would. The voiceover work for each hero is nicely done, even if it is a bit cheesy at times. But hey, aren’t all superhero quips cheesy by nature anyway?