Genre: Action/RPG
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Raven Software
Release Date: October 24, 2006

This review is going to require a massive amount of restraint for me.

I am a Marvel fanboy.

Sure, I love all media in a strangely obsessive way – film, books, videogames, and yeah, comics, too – but there are a few creators and ideas that seem to click with me perfectly. Jim Jarmusch, Kurt Vonnegut, Hideo Kojima, and Brian Bendis cause me to blindly buy into whatever they do, and I probably shouldn't be allowed to review anything they work on, at least by any sensible editor. While I've hated my fair share of Marvel books throughout the years – hundreds, probably – I have this strange affinity for anything related to the Marvel Universe and even its spin-offs (Ultimate Marvel, Squadron Supreme, that possible future universe where Spider-Girl is set, etc., etc., etc.). It has something to do with my childhood obsession with Spider-Man comics, along with rediscovering that, after the hell that was the '90s, comic books with superheroes suddenly became not just good, but one of the best, most complex genre-storytelling mediums. That's basically saying that superhero comics have become the best of the derivative media, but hey, almost all media is derivative, so that's saying a lot!

I have an immense amount of respect for these characters; in fact, the only "pocket" of Marvel's work that I've never really clicked with is the ever-popular X-Men world, which I've always found to be far too convoluted for my tastes – and I'm reading Astonishing X-Men in paperback form, because it's so well made. Captain America, traditionally one of the more two-dimensional characters in the Marvel arsenal, has, thanks to the handling of writers Ed Brubaker and Mark Millar, become probably the most complex and captivating of the bunch. I'm even reading Moon Knight every month – a character I've never had any connection to, and never read any of the previous volumes worth of stories about – and I'm stuck to it. This is a good time to be reading mainstream comics, and things are poised to get even better.

And here is my trouble with Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I tell myself that I'm back into mainstream comics because the writing and art is good enough to erase the pitiful missteps of the '90s, but really, a good half of that excitement is because I love these characters simply because they are. It's that childish part of my brain that, as a 10-year-old, couldn't stomach the way Captain America talked, but loved the way he could knock out 30 Hydra foot soldiers with a single toss of his shield – the same feeling that kept me reading throughout the notoriously misguided Clone Saga just because I could see Spidey climb up walls and flip-kick bad guys, even if I hated the way the all-new female version of Doctor Octopus looked and acted (and this very sacrifice causing me to drop away from all mainstream comics after being exhausted by the wasteful resolution of this storyline). You know what I'm talking about – that part of your brain that makes you think Gambit is the coolest character ever despite your better judgment in similar situations; it's the part of my brain that wants me to stand up and thrust my fist into the air while yelling, "Marvel Ultimate Alliance? Ten out of ten!"

In case all of this careful explaining and justification hasn't tipped you off, my better judgment tells me that this game doesn't deserve anywhere near that score.

It's a fun game, and it doesn't fix enough of the game-stopping problems from the PSP version of X-Men Legends 2, and I'm a Marvel fanboy, so it's going to be a long, hard process that leads me to giving this game a truly unbiased score.

So, I'll solve the problem by jumping directly from this emotional dilemma to a quick summary of big complaints. The main problem can be summed up in a single word: generic. Of course, I won't be content to stop there. Mainstream comics, especially as of late, have impeccable graphic design, and individual books have increasingly unique design. Look at the Wildstorm re-launch of The Authority, which has a glassy, slightly blurry look, and big, widescreen panels that stretch to the very edge of the pages. Marvel's current event, Civil War, has dampened, realistic coloring and hyper-detailed art, but despite those concepts, doesn't attempt realism. Ultimate Alliance, despite being based on modern comics and containing a great deal of references to modern comics, does not reflect the current state of either the comics medium, or its own medium, video games. Especially video games.

We're in the process of making a jump into a whole new set of consoles, and Ultimate Alliance has the 2D design of a PC game from 1998. Big, Impact text, italicized to make the Impact Impact even more! Lots of flat, metallic grays. And the stylistic aspect that comics don't have, sound, is just as generic and inappropriate for the characters. The music is either a sterile symphonic bore or an embarrassing hard rock piece, all of which sounds as if it were cooked up by a broken demographic-scanning robot. The voice-acting isn't entirely off, tonally, and some of the things they say ("Better than the super soldier serum!" when Captain America levels up) are just silly enough in that classic comic book way, that the cheesiness seems inherent to the medium instead of coming off as the usual oversight on the part of the developer. But just about everything Wolverine says is hard proof that those moments had more to do with astrology than good direction.

What more could we expect from a franchise by the makers of Quake 4?

Like Quake 4, along with the more appropriate comparison to X-Men Legends and its sequel, Ultimate Alliance has a great deal of merits despite the flood of immediately recognizable problems. That is, merits aside from allowing me to play as Captain America in his Ultimate costume, or Spider-Man in his black costume, or the PSP-exclusive return of Hawkeye, who happens to be dead in the comics (I could literally go on like this for hours) .... The four-player offline action is a good argument for why the original form of the beat-'em-up genre has given way to these arcade-style action-RPGs. (Get ready for a great rhyme, here.) These games are just as fun and half as dumb (okay, so it was a song rhyme, but it's catchy, ain't it?)

You can charge through Ultimate Alliance and set everything to auto-manage itself, so you can focus on beating the crap out of Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil, or, you can take breaks after a few party members level up and manage how many points to apply to which special ability, and what costume to wear. If you're really into experimenting, you can try to think up members of famous and not-so-famous Marvel teams, and put them together for special bonuses. My favorite: Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Captain America and Wolverine to form the New Avengers, which happens to be one of my favorite books right now. (By the way, the presence of Luke Cage as a playable character – and you don't even have to unlock him! – is a fanboy dream!)

For offline muliplayer, each player can use any characters from their personal rosters to join in on the host's campaign. If you don't have enough players, optional AI combatants are available, and all of the commands from single-player (aggressive, defend, follow leader) still work. The trouble is, with four main characters on-screen, the slowdown becomes pressing enough that it often causes unnecessary deaths because of how disorienting it can be. I know this is the PSP version, but after X-Men Legends 2 performing as slowly as it did, perhaps the developer could have gotten a better hold of how to get the game up and running more smoothly on the platform.

The multiplayer fun ends once things are taken online. Players either start new, online-only campaigns or jump into the middle of a campaign owned by the host. No importing of personal characters is allowed, inexplicably, which really takes away from the action-RPG aspect of the game. True, it's fun to go online to find people to pummel Hydra with, in almost the same way playing Captain America and the Avengers with strangers in the arcade was a blast, but a big portion of the game – leveling up and customizing characters – is lost for the online mode, which is usually crafted to present the greatest possible replayability.

I had hoped this would be fixed after what happened with X-Men Legends 2 on the PSP, especially after how quickly online games disappeared from those servers, but here I am now, staring at a blank lobby screen. I've only managed to play two matches in the entire time I've had this title in my possession, and I'm sure this wouldn't be the case if players could bring their personalized relationship with their own characters to the online stage.

When the X-Men Legends titles came out, I had a blast but was left cold by the bugs and problems, not to mention my lack of affection for the X-Men as characters. I'd always wanted a full-on Marvel Universe version of these games, now that it's here, I'm not sure the time was right for it to release. This is definitely the greatest example of comic book fan-service ever conceived, but the gamer side of my brain has too many issues with the title to let it off the hook for those reasons alone. Here's to the inevitable sequel being fully next-generized (there's a new industry term for the box art guys to grab. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 – Next-generized! – WorthPlaying). The potential has been there since the first game. Hopefully, it'll be realized before something better comes along.

Score: 6.5/10