Marvel Ultimate Alliance is going to be the game that comic book fans will drool over for months after it releases. Who hasn’t wanted to take their favorite Marvel super-heroes and come up with the Marvel Dream Team or something? The sheer number of playable characters is immense, but the roster of villains is even more impressive. One concern going into the recent Activision press event was that the game would be little more than a glorified X-men Legends with tons more characters. After getting a couple hours to tinker with the game’s near-finished code, we can safely say that we aren’t as worried as we were before.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, please allow me to bring you up to speed. Dr. Doom is bringing the world of evil together to concoct the ultimate diabolical scheme imaginable. To stop him, players will have to battles across a slew of different environments, and even dimensions, to stop Doom and his lackeys in their tracks. Both the game and our demonstration open aboard the SHIELD helicopter as it is under attack by the forces of Doom. Nick Fury, too busy with whatever paperwork is involved with his job, summons your team of superheroes to help repel the attack and assess the situation.

The opening level is a designed tutorial mission to introduce players to the game’s movement and combat. Players will learn how to perform simple “Open door” functions as well as combo attacks and how to use special powers. Beating up on henchmen is a cinch; players can simply hit the quick strike button to take any of these early enemies out. After meeting up with Fury and learning that his strategic nuclear missiles have been set to launch by Doom’s men, the enemy strength is notched up a little (but not much).

A few of the enemies that you encounter during this introductory level, and throughout the rest of the game for that matter, will have special attributes that you must deal with in addition to simply beating them down. For instance, some of the enemies in this first level are resistant to energy attacks, while others are constantly regaining health as you fight them. Anyone who played the Legends titles, or Champions of Norrath for that matter, will know exactly what is in store for them. Another aspect of these games present in Ultimate Alliance is destructible objects that drop collectable tokens and health or energy orbs. The tokens enable you to unlock additional powers and stat-boosting items, among other things as well. Grabbing as many as possible is never a bad thing, though they aren’t a requirement by any means.

After thumping a couple dozen henchmen and making your way to the weapon control room; you will encounter Bullseye and challenge him to get to the missile control panel behind him. This boss battle isn’t very tough, but his henchmen do a decent job of getting in your way as you try to focus on Bullseye. Early on in the game, fighting with four heroes at the same time may feel redundant given that the groups you encounter are rarely as large. Don’t let this level fool you, the game certainly gets tough a little ways through..

When smacking around evil doers on your way to your current objective, players gain experience for every dude they defeat. Like any other Action-RPG, your superheroes level up based on their current level and the level of the enemies around you. As you gain levels, you unlock additional super powers and can also strengthen the powers you already have. For instance, at level 2 Wolverine gains the ability to enter a berserker mode that increases his speed and fighting ability. Other characters will unlock abilities to support the whole team, like Iceman’s ability to freeze his team’s hands for additional damage. In addition to adding or strengthening abilities with every level gained, the obligatory additional health and energy points are also added to keep with the RPG aspect of the typical Action-RPG model.

When I was done saving Fury’s ass and whatever unfortunate city Bullseye was aiming for, the demo moved me to a boss battle that player should occur around the time their characters are at Level 12. Walking down a snowy path devoid of enemies or desctructable objects I was surprised when I ran into Ymir, the 25 foot tall (rough estimate) ice creature with a poor disposition. He prefers to settle things with his club, so the team must take him down by force. This particular boss battle is unique because it requires Ymir to summon his henchmen, spear-carrying yetis, for you to do any damage to him. After defeating one of these henchmen, you have to climb up his club after he pounds it into the ground, climb up to his shoulders, and plunge the henchman’s spear into his neck, following on-screen commands ala God of War the entire time. After repeating this process five or six times, Ymir falls down and, like all other bosses, drops a permanent stat-boosting item for one of your heroes to collect.

Boss battles promise to range from the regular-sized villains like Bullseye to the uber-huge guys like Ymir and bigger. One “regular-sized” boss that we encountered during this demo-play was the Grey Gargoyle who guarded the Mandarin Palace. As you begin to pound away at the Grey Gargoyle, he defends himself with a number of ground-pounds, quick strikes, and even a power that encases your character in stone. As if that wasn’t tough enough, monks would spawn every so often to support the boss by enchanting him with their regeneration aura. If you cornered these monks one-on-one, they would take a couple hits and then turn into stone, immune from further attacks. After five or ten minutes of trying to beat the gargoyle and althernate to his henchmen, I was finally able to start taking them out one by one, eventually elminating them from the fight altogether and making my job much easier.

Fighting the Gray Gargoyle on the Xbox 360 was a pain in the rear, but it doesn’t compare to how tough it was on the Wii with three other guys. Ultimate Alliance on Wii is essentially the same game as the other consoles that its releasing for, with a couple obvious differences. One, it’s a lot less attractive on Wii than elsewhere, and two, the control scheme is much more interactive using the motion-sensing Wii-mote. While moving with the analog on the nunchuk, players can also use their quick-strikes by either wiggling the controller back-and-forth horizontally or by tapping the A button. For uppercuts, you jerk the want upward and for charge attacks jerk downwards. Using superpowers on Wii is both more convenient and more difficult depending on your experience with the controller itself. While players on the Xbox 360 and PS3 are stuck pulling on a trigger or shoulder button and pushing a button for their super powers, Wii players have access to nearly all their powers at any given time. All they have to do is memorize what the specific motion is for the particular power and perform it while holding the B button.

Our experience with this function wasn’t nearly as successful as with the Wii-mote as it was with the simple button combo commands on the other consoles. If, for instance, you didn’t remember what the command was for the specific power, you would be forced to take time out of the fight, look up the power by scrolling to it in your little corner of the screen, and then performing it. Even if I did memorize what the motion was, the Wii-mote sometimes had a hard time doing exactly what I needed it to do. The developer that was helping us throughout kept saying that players having trouble may be holding the controller too low for the sensor on top of the television to read accurately, but enough of us were having trouble to take what he said with a grain of salt. Not being able to use the correct power at the appropriate time with accuracy was a buzz-kill..

Where the Wii-mote really impressed us was in the Ymir battle described above. Instead of simple button commands, players had to perform gestures with the Wii-mote to climb the ice monster and successfully strike him with the spear. Even as cool as this was, I did notice a little quirk while watching others perform the series. When the screen prompted a player to thrust forward many jerked upwards instead without consequence. It seemed that, based on this and the difficulty in accurately performing super powers on demand, the Wii-motes weren’t completely mastered by the development team when they brought this demo to the press event. For what its worth, when the controls did work, they kept players interested with interaction instead of simple button mashing. PS3 players shouldn’t feel left out on the motion-sensing fun; the PS3 controller’s motion sensors are being utilized to control boss battles much the same as the Wii-mote as well. Throwing enemies will be as easy as grabbing them with a button press and a quick jerk with the controller as well .

All of these mechanics and jargon above will mean little to die-hard Marvel fans who have been itching to get experience as comprehensive comic experience such as this. Players will be able to construct their own team, complete with their own custom team name and team icon, from any combination of the 20-plus playable characters. If instead, players want to stick to the traditional teams instead, they can choose to play with the Fantastic Four and gain a team bonus such as regenerating health or additional damage. For you statistic nerds out there, 20-plus characters with four possible spots to fill, where order doesn’t matter, equals a hell of a lot of different team combinations. What, I’m not a math major! Our team you ask? Oh, we’re the Floating Morons of Justice; comprised of Spider Man, Thor, Silver Surfer, and Iron Man.

And that’s what we imagine will appeal to most gamers about this title the most. Players will be able to throw the most improbable character combinations together and smack Doctor Doom around until he starts crying for mommy. Sure, on the surface this game looks like a really nice sequel to X-men Legends 2, but when you dig deeper into it you find plenty more to be excited about. Well, that’s what we are hoping at least, because we won’t be completely sure until we see it’s final build when the game releases later this month (or until launch of the PS3 and Wii)..

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