Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 Review

By: Caleb A

Marvel, by all means, is a company that likes to provide excellent service to fans while also subverting expectations.  One of these moments came last December when Marvel announced that a long-dormant video game franchise was returning. Needless to say, fans of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance franchise were shocked and excited to a new entry in this series. Flash forward to the game’s release this past weekend and the question has to be asked: “Does it live up to the hype?” Let’s dig into this game and find out.

What is this game about?
 
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 is a classic dungeon crawler, beat ‘em up game similar to the Diablo or Gauntlet franchises. Players choose from a diverse roster of Marvel characters to create teams that will travel the vast Marvel Multiverse. The franchise is known for allowing players to team up with friends to play through the story and trials modes.

The game features two modes: story mode and Infinity trial mode (more on that later). The story isn’t very complex but considering that children are more than likely going to play this game, it doesn’t have to be. Thanos and his henchmen, The Black Order, are after the Infinity Stones. It's up to your group of Marvel characters to prevent him from obtaining all the stones for his Infinity Gauntlet. To anyone who has watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe or read the Infinity Saga from the comics, this should seem extremely familiar. Although the story may seem like a retread from the movies and comics, the game developers put their spin on the events. They presented their version of the story in a way that seems almost entirely different from what we’ve already seen in other media. Personally, it was nice to see the X-Men and Deadpool (who were not in the MCU movies) take on a bigger role in the story.
 
One of the best parts of this game is the superior voice acting throughout the game’s cutscenes. The game developers went above and beyond scouting talent for the voice actors. In a nice personal touch to the game, a lot of characters are voiced by their voice actors from other media. For example, pretty much all of the X-Men characters were voiced by their original actors from the 90’s cartoon (which was an awesome bit of nostalgia for me as that’s what got me introduced to Marvel back in the day).

Graphics and Gameplay
 
The graphics for this game have an incredible polish on them. The art style the developers chose makes it look like the characters and environments are torn right from the comics or cartoons. It should be mentioned though that a lot of the characters look exactly like their big-screen counterparts. It's not so much that they look out of place in the cartoonish world around them. I loved how I could have a team of MCU looking characters interact with 90s cartoon looking characters.
 
Speaking of characters, there are roughly 30 characters to be unlocked on the cartridge with plans for DLC characters in the future. Each character feels unique in how they play and that makes building teams a lot more fun. At the surface level, every character has the same standard moves: light attack, heavy attack, dodge, and jump. The uniqueness in each character shines when looking at special attacks and abilities.

Abilities are small touches on characters that make them unique. Examples include characters who can fly being able to attack while airborne (i.e. Thor and Iron Man), characters with healing abilities being able to regenerate health in battle (i.e. Deadpool and Wolverine), and characters with webs being able to swing around (i.e. Spider-Man and any other Spiderverse character)
 
As you level up with each character they unlock a special move. Not all characters have the same type of special moves so it really pays to try out everyone and see what works best for your play style. One cool aspect of the game is the Synergy Special moves where you combine your character’s special moves together with another character’s to create an especially devastating combo move. My personal favorite is having Iron Man reflect his laser beams off Captain America’s shield to attack multiple enemies.  To create even more chaos against enemies you can have characters use their Extreme move which deals massive damage to surrounding foes. Players can stack their extreme moves together in a screen-clearing spectacle.

As mentioned earlier character progression is an important factor in this game. If your characters are under-leveled some segments of the game might become extremely difficult to proceed through. As you level up your characters they receive increased stats and abilities. The Infinity Trials mode is one great way to remedy an under-leveled character problem. There are Infinity Rifts found throughout every level which offer challenges to your team of heroes. Upon completing these challenges you can unlock experience boosts and alternate costumes for your squad. There were multiple times throughout my playthrough where I had to do Infinity Trials to level up my favorite characters to even give them a chance at succeeding in a level.

One final aspect of gameplay is multiplayer. You and up to three friends can all choose a hero to play as during the story. Playing in a group with the local play was fun because you could easily communicate with those in the room, however, the camera for this mode was a concern. The camera’s focus while playing would often put itself in a bad position and so some players couldn’t see what their character was doing. The camera was sometimes a problem in single-player as well but not as bad as in local multiplayer.
 
Online multiplayer works pretty well. The camera only follows your character just like in single-player. The main problem with playing online multiplayer was the lack of an online chat system. It is difficult to coordinate with other players without voice chat and that made a few sections of the game almost impossible.

Conclusion

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 does a fantastic job of keeping the recent post Avengers: Endgame Marvel hype going by providing fun and challenging gameplay. Having to create 4 person teams out of a 30+ character roster helps to keep the game fresh while presenting a familiar Marvel story.  If you love dungeon crawling, beat ‘em up style games or if you love anything Marvel this is one you’ll surely want to check out.

(Author’s note: This game had a lot of content and so it was hard to talk about everything here. I apologize if I missed something but I wanted to try and keep this brief.)

Let us know what you thought of the game in the comments below.