This extends your playtime greatly by not only providing an extra mission, but by giving you further incentive to explore the massive levels. These outfits are unlocked by completing objectives in the game, or by collecting character specific mission discs that provide more game outside of the standard campaign. Spider-Man for example can wear his classic costume, the Scarlet Spider outfit, the alien black costume as well as the Iron Spider costume and all have different stats and upgrades that encourage you to play through the game more than once. Characters also have alternate costumes that can be unlocked by meeting certain requirements that are more than just a palette swap. Holding down the a trigger allows you to use all four face buttons to unleash character specific attacks like firing impact webs as Spider-Man, repulsors as Iron Man or hurling Captain America’s mighty shield. Playing as a team of up to four characters, whether alone or with friends, you punch through waves of goons and bosses to level up your team and enhance their abilities. Those who played either of the X-Men Legends game will feel right at home with Marvel Ultimate Alliance as the fundamentals are more or less the same, which is not a bad thing at all. I thought knew a lot about Marvel comics before I played this game for the first time, but learned about Lockjaw, the teleporting dog, by playing through this for the first time. Anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed about getting into comics could do a lot worse than playing through this game. Between level conversations with characters provide insights into character origins, motivations and history that’s not too long for those who already know, yet long enough for those who don’t know who the Inhumans are or what their home of Attilan is. What Marvel Ultimate Alliance does great is explaining everything it presents because the developers understood that this game would not only be played by the hardest of hardcore Marvel fans, but those who may not have read a Marvel comic in their life. This also adds a lot of environmental variety where one second you’re exploring the fiery realm of Mephisto before going to the snowy home of the frost giants and the Skrull home world while it’s in the middle of an attack by Galactus.
This brings a lot of excitement to each level as you’ll play one more level just to see where the game will take you next. As mentioned above, you’re visiting a lot of strange and bizarre locations that shouldn’t really mesh with one another but do within the context of the game and its conflict. Like Lego Marvel Super Heroes that would come over half a decade after it, Marvel Ultimate Alliance not only does right by its characters and villains, but in its environments. You have characters like Iron Man, Thor, Doctor Strange, members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four and locations as varied as Atlantis, Asgard, Latveria and the realm of Mephisto and yet they all make sense in the context of this game. What it does accomplish however is linking the entirety of the Marvel Universe which is a very hard thing to do when you think about it, especially as at the time it hadn’t really been tried before. That’s the basic premise of Marvel Ultimate Alliance and through the course of the fifteen to twenty hour campaign there are a few twists and curve balls thrown. Admittedly the story is not the strongest part of this game, and the between level cut-scenes are perhaps the only aspect of the game that have not aged well over time. When Doctor Doom attacks a S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier and announces to the world that he has gathered a new Masters of Evil, Nick Fury assembles an ultimate alliance of super powered individuals from every corner of the Marvel Universe to stop the evil dictator from conquering the universe. Whether you’re a fan of the films, the comics, cartoons or other video games based on Marvel properties, Marvel Ultimate Alliance has something for everyone. Before the release of MUA there were plenty of Spider-Man, X-Men and other Marvel games but none that had allowed all facets of the Universe to exist at the same time and also wrapped in a package that’s very fun to play.
X-Men Legends 3 didn’t happen because developer Raven had moved out of a tiny corner of the Marvel Universe into a much, much bigger playground: The ENTIRE Marvel Universe.
Unlike other franchises that have languished in limbo with no conclusion however, like MegaMan Legends, it wasn’t because the series was dead or the creators had been taken off the series. At the conclusion of 2005’s X-Men Legends 2, a stinger set up a third chapter in the excellent action-RPG series that we would unfortunately never see.