Yet another 1080p game "Marvel Ultimate Alliance Hands-On"

[Monkey]

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http://360.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=8614

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.

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.

Graphically, the PlayStation 3 version looked the best of the three and sported some interesting distortion and blur effects that were absent from the Xbox 360 and Wii versions. Powerful attacks on the PS3 caused ripples of invisible energy to distort the area around the attack momentarily. When asked why this was absent from the 360 version, a developer told us that it was due to the PS3’s ability to handle shaders differently than what can be done on the 360 or Wii. Both the 360 and PS3 versions made use of impressive lighting techniques, particle effects, hi-res textures, and impressive character models while the Wii looks to be a mild step up from the current-gen efforts; though that is certainly to be expected at this point. Also, the PlayStation 3 version of the game was shown running in 1080p, which looked absolutely incredible and sharp while the Xbox 360 was running at a respectable 720p and the Wii version running at 480p. All three versions supported 16:9 widescreen modes.

[partridge]

...and yet another first gen PS3 game that is technically ahead of it's Xbox360 counterpart. All good news!

At this rate 2nd and 3rd gen PS3 games are going to leave the 360 behind.

[Dave]

10x!

[JTK]

I've had this game on my radar for a while.

Just more good news here.