G-pinions

First GRID, then AIDS, then MULA. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, that is. I was just arguing with Tom as to whether the game even deserves more press, whether this column was even worth writing. 86.7% on Gamerankings!? Something is grossly awry with this industry - on the developer end, on the publisher end, on the journalism end, and on the consumer end. That's no revelation, I know, but never has something I wanted to love so much disappointed and insulted me so thoroughly.

The game is an abomination. A disgusting amalgam of half-baked gameplay mechanics, utterly uninspired level and scenario design, broken combat and boss fights, convoluted, uninteresting story and more bugs than you can ring out of a corpse.

Slapping an incredibly flexible and exciting license such as Marvel on something so fundamentally unsound is perhaps the biggest insult of all. I LOVE Marvel, I LOVE the X-Men, and I will try anything with Wolverine once. But to cripple characters when it's convenient to your story or RPG progression? To mash everything good and sensible awkwardly together so that fans of Radioactive Man won't throw a fit when he's left out? The game couldn't be more sound theoretically (action-RPG in the Marvel universe), and probably couldn't be any worse in execution (though I haven't played the Wii version).

Want just one example of how simply broken the game is? Tom and I (after having to rejoin one another a half dozen times thanks to poor network code) were fighting a giant ice Yeti, or something. A boss whose name I forget for good reason. He spits out minions who carry ludicrously large spears; once you have killed the minion and taken his spear, you can actually damage the boss by climbing his body in a little button-pressing minigame and stabbing him in the neck (well, if you do it four times). Problem is, Wolverine was equipped (auto-equipped, mind you) with an item that puts enemies under your control for a good while, meaning you can't attack them and they'll attack whomever you're fighting. However, this breaks the boss fight - you can't get their spears since you can't kill them, and they can't hurt the boss since only you can, with a spear. After wrestling with the game to find out what the hell was doing that, we finally found the item and figured we could just unequip it. How wrong we were - that just led to the enemy being neither here nor there, permanently unkillable and useless to all. The game broke itself, auto-equipping the wrong item at the wrong time.

I refuse to believe that so many reviewers had so much fun with this game, especially multiplayer. Who wouldn't start skipping the terrible story after the few dozen interruptions? The potential fun of combat is negated by haphazard collision detection; more to the point, who thought it was a good idea to make a game with twenty playable characters with different animations and move sets, when they can't even get one feeling right? The entire experience is bogged down by this lack of priorities. They seem to have built a game around making sure every inch of a license is used, regardless of how fitting it is, but forgot to do anything remotely compelling with it.

No matter what 'gen' you put this is, it's an embarrassment for everyone involved. Don't be fooled by good reviews - Ultimate Alliance gives Action-RPGS, Marvel, and Activision a bad name. And somehow, in a move I can hardly even understand, they managed to ruin co-op. For shame.