I’ve been pretty excited for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 despite the stylized graphics that in my opinion look awful. I’ve now been playing it when I can over the last week or so and have some thoughts on the game. Overall, I’m a little disappointed in it. I got a little used to the graphics, but everything else about it has been “meh” in my experience. Maybe it’s because I’ve only gotten through beating Kingpin, but it’s not very engaging for me.
The first problem I had was that MUA3 starts you off with the Guardians of the Galaxy. I enjoy these characters in the films sometimes, but they’re not my favorite. Pair that with the awful to decent voice acting and I’m having a hard time getting into the story. Essentially, Thanos wants the Infinity Stones and thanks to the Guardians interfering, the stones get shot throughout Earth and you have to beat Thanos to collecting them all. You then start to accumulate heroes with big names like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow (among many others) to help get more casual fans invested. These accumulations happen either slowly or via a giant dump of 5+ new characters. Overall, creating different teams and combinations has been the highlight of the game for me. Unfortunately, the characters don’t seem to be very unique. It feels as if there are really about 1-2 characters with all the different skins applied to fill out a roster. All melee characters will typically have a barrage of fists/weapons special and a charged up punch/ram special for example as their first two special attacks.
As I already mentioned, I love thinking up various combinations of teammates to see just how random I can get. However, for more serious players, there’s a neat feature in the Hero Select menu that tells you what heroes will generate certain bonuses. This tool is incredible and fun to look at and see what some of these combinations are.
Normally, I’d say MUA3 is a dud because of all the reasons I’ve listed. However, I do really enjoy grabbing a controller, handing another to my wife and being able to sit down and play some couch co-op. Even though the characters are all virtually the same, it’s still fun to play with a friend (or 3) and pretend to be some of your favorite superheroes. Of course, the heroes available is limited, but there is DLC that will continue to add characters, plus everyone will get two free characters in the not too distant future (Cyclops and Colossus).
I think one thing I’d like to see implemented although it may not actually work as well as I’d like is for fan voting and suggestions for future characters. I’d love it if there were polls that fans could take to help determine what future characters show up. I also hope that as I play through the game that I’m proven wrong about the characters being so similar. I remember playing through X-Men Legends and the characters felt a lot more different. There was still some overlap, but the unique abilities and visuals of each character seemed to shine more.
