As a lover of comic books, the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance was excellent fan service. Not only did it give you a diverse roster of heroes to play with, along with great abilities and unlockable costumes, it also gave you some RPG like attributes where you could level up your character and abilities however you saw fit. It was great fun and I still go back and play the simulator missions to unlock more costumes for my characters. So, you can imagine my excitement when MUA2 was released for the PS3. However, now that I’m playing the game I’m finding Activision took the lazy route and really watered down what could have been a great game.

First off, my aforementioned love of unlocking costumes took a serious nerf. In the original game you could unlock three additional costumes for each character, with each costume giving new attributes or stat boosts.  Not so in MUA2. Now each character only gets one unlockable costume and it’s merely a skin swap. No new stats or boost, just something to change on your team’s display. Weaksauce.

Second, the cast of characters is a bit disappointing. I know any Marvel game will be required to feature the most popular characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Captain America, but I expected more diversity between this set of characters and those featured in the first game. The only notable inclusions are Songbird, Green Goblin and Iron Fist. The rest of the characters are nearly identical to the first game’s cast. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more additions via DLC since there are so many unplayable characters in the game with finished models and full power sets, but it still irks me that I’m playing with nearly the exact same characters as I did in the first game. I’d give up half of the current roster to play as Cloak & Dagger or Firestar.

My final gripe has to do with the game’s interface. At first glance it’s very slick and stylized. You can tell the designers intended you to play on Captain America’s side, as every screen has his shield logo and stars plastered everywhere. Even the power-ups in the game are shaped like little Cap shields. But once you start actually using the interface it’s apparent just how little work went into them. First off, when you want to load a game, you can choose Continue or Load.  Ok, aren’t they both the same?  Apparently Continue starts you off at the last auto-save point, and Load only selects your manually saved games. So if you saved a game after an autosave and choose Continue by accident, you’ll lose progress. Also, after choosing either option it goes back to the same selection screen and just sits there, making it look like it’s not loading your game.  After fifteen seconds or so it finally switches to a loading screen. It’s pretty disconcerting to watch.

The screens where you manage your character’s powers and abilities are pretty bare bones as well.  This seemed to be much more intuitive in the first game and here it’s just a list of stuff. There’s really no reason to turn off the auto-allocate feature since I’d probably have no idea where to start with this screen anyway. So I’ll just let the game think for me, taking out the main RPG element that made the first game much more than just a beat-em-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying this MUA2 as a straight action game, and the Civil War storyline is very well done. Graphically it’s a bump up from the last game but nothing drastic (the CG cut scenes are actually very poorly done for being on “next gen” hardware). The new Fusion powers are fun when you can decimate an entire screen of enemies or finish off a boss. Plus the possibility that I’ll get the myriad of unplayable characters as DLC is enticing. I just wish they’d have put more effort into making this an improvement over the previous game rather than cranking out a graphical upgrade.