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There are certain things in this world that have always gone well together. Spaghetti and meatballs, peanut butter and jelly, Larry, Moe, and Curly, the Harlem Globetrotters and the New York Nationals (formerly known as the Washington Generals); each of these duos (or trios) has a great synergy that allows them to work together, with individual pieces raising the ceiling of possibility for the others. Comic books and video games are the same way. Tons of kids follow the adventures of their favorite heroes, wishing they had super powers to fight evil. Video games give us these powers and allow us to save the day in any number of exciting personalities. Meanwhile, the episodic nature of comics matches perfectly with video games – as we now have interesting, well developed, piecemeal stories that match up with the levels and arenas that we constantly battle through. This promising foundation is one of the things that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (MUA) understands and uses well.

MUA is principally about two things: (1) a beat-'em-up romp of a video game, and (2) a chance to manage, grow, and deploy your own team of superheroes from every corner of the Marvel universe. There are lots of fun extras that exist alongside these two mainstays, but the game's main line can be boiled down to those two points. First, the gameplay itself!

For the vast majority of the game, you will have 4 of your team's heroes on-screen. You'll assume active control of one hero with the others being governed by an AI that responds to basic commands such as “defensive”, “follow”, and “assist”. The basic fighting moves are pretty standard and include light attacks, heavy attacks, grabs, and the various chains that one might expect to bloom from these moves. We all know, however, that you don't play this game to box – no matter how cool your hero looks bashing people in the head – and that's where the superpowers come in! You'll have 4 of your active hero's trademark skills available for use, and as long as you have “energy” enough to pull it off, you can launch attack after attack. Pulling off simultaneous power attacks with two heroes will boost the effectiveness of each one, so try to pay attention to what your CPU-brained buddies are doing and you'll get a boost. All this wailing away on opponents is the lifeblood of every good comic protagonist, and as you do so you gain “momentum”. When a hero is fully juiced up on momentum, you can launch a powerful AE attack that follows their theme, combining with any other similarly juiced heroes to do massive damage.

The only real departure from this fighting mechanic is boss fights, which inevitably have some form of villain-inspired trick that you must pull off to complete the battle. Most often, this trick launches a button-matching minigame, where completion of the matching sequence nets boss damage to an otherwise immune behemoth. This is a decent angle, and often the flavor action going on behind the button-matching is fun to watch – but you can't really revel in it, because you're busy pattern-matching! The boss tricks can be annoying to spot, too, which results in a bit of frustration as you run around attempting to survive while an invulnerable villain takes his shots. If you don't pull off the right trick within a certain amount of time, the game WILL give you a hint – but they fail to help as often as not.

The good:
The gameplay can be as shallow or as deep as you want, and your success won't be particularly hampered by a lack of desire to constantly swap heroes and launch superpowers again and again. If you're a “The Thing” kind of guy, and you just want to armor up, wade in, and punch people while your teammates do their thing (ha!), you can do so and still beat up a whole lot of bad guys. If you're a more active gamer, you can start with the Thing and thunderclap a crowd of henchmen, then quickly switch to the Human Torch and cut loose with an AE flame attack, then bounce over to Mr. Fantastic and finish them off with a wild swing of your newly charged super-sized fists, potentially scoring a fire/rubber damage bonus for combining those last two attacks! (that description was for you Fantastic Four fans.) It's all about what you as a player want to do. If you, as a player, want to have your buddies over – you're in luck! Multi-player mode is crazy fun! You get far more power combos when you can yell at your Iron Man buddy to launch missiles at the same time your Dr. Strange is unleashing the Falteen Flames. There's even a slight competitive aspect to the Arcade mode, as team members compete to see who can KO the most bad guys in a level and take home the “Most Valuable Hero” award.

The bad:
The AI needs to watch the old “Napster Bad!” Metallica spoof, which included the lesson “Fire Bad!”. Seriously, the environmental damage is over the top considering you have no control over 3 of your 4 heroes. I can't stress this enough. Way too many times have I heard a hero suddenly say, “I need some health” followed by an immediate, “Yaargghh!” as they die in a fire somewhere off screen. I would surmise that the root of the problem is poor pathing, which results in a hero that can't find his way back to his buddies – and his best guess cuts right through an environmental hazard of some form. It's horrible to cut your way through a swarm of Doom-bots with nary a scratch, only to have a team member instantly ganked because he jumped into a pit. It wouldn't be TOO bad if the save points weren't sparse, which results far too often in an internal conversation vaguely like, “Well gee, do I want to walk all the way back to that S.H.I.E.L.D access point to save – or do I risk someone taking a flying leap before I find another one in the nebulous future?” It's a debate with no good outcome! I'm going to include MUA's puzzle system here in the “bad” section – but really it's just vanilla. Pull levers, slide boxes, dodge in between timed hazards – nothing you haven't done 1000 times before.

Before I move on to the team-building part of the game, I want to mention the side-aspects of MUA that are built in for added value. As you adventure, you'll find discs that give you access to some of the best solo stories in your Marvel hero's careers. These have no bearing on the progress of your main story, but are fun for background purposes and give you a chance to play through a whole mission as a solo hero taking on one of their arch-enemies. These missions are scored based on time, kills, and mission objectives and the higher scores will win bronze, silver, and gold prizes for your characters. They're generically fun – but they don't scale much with hero level, so you'll find your veteran heroes with tons of powerups blowing them away while your less-used characters struggle more. MUA also includes a trivia game. Each correct response earns you experience points that make your heroes more powerful, and the answer to almost all questions can be found in-game. This means that trivia isn't just for the comics fans that already know all the answers! Trivia is a fun distraction between missions, and a chance to earn some easy level-ups for your guys, if you pay attention in your missions. Lastly, there's a neat comic-art gallery that you fill up by finding sketchbooks scattered throughout the world. This won't do much for you unless you're a fan of the Marvel heroes, but I certainly thought the Ghost Rider art was cool!

Team management, or, “outfits and powers and super gear, oh my!”
First, I'll speak to your team. At the start of the game, you can change heroes in and out without penalty, but eventually the game has you form your own super team (I formed “The Oz-vengers”!) with 4 founding members. Replacing any of these heroes will cost you reputation points, which you earn by completing mission objectives. That's no fun! Luckily, you can buy up a stat called “bench” which allows you to expand your roster beyond the original 4. At that point, you can swap in any member of your bench for free. Other “team” stat boosters are available, and do expected things like boosting the health and energy of all team members.

Individual heroes have a variety of powers that mimic their comic book abilities, but you can only have 4 loaded up and active at a time. Casual gamers can easily load the ones they enjoy the most and go to town. People looking a little more in depth will synergize their power choices between team members and look for things that play off one another – but you don't have to think too hard because there's an “action menu” system in place to allow you to choose powers on the fly if you need to swap something in or out. Powers are fairly diverse, ranging from beam weapons to stat boosters to radial attacks, with plenty of diversity in each hero's repertoire – so a given team member is rarely stuck in one role. Heroes also have a variety of outfits, but they aren't just for looks! Each outfit will have 3 category boosters that make the hero tougher in some way, so not only can you choose the right hero for the job – you can also choose the right threads. At times, you just might have to wear the coolest looking outfit no matter what the mission is – and that's perfectly understandable. A hero can't pound villains if he doesn't look sweet doing it. The last aspect of an individual hero is his gear. Each hero is allowed to wear a single piece of equipment gained in their adventures, and this gear is typically a potent enhancer. Equipment can be worn, traded, and sold for credits, so there's no hurt in switching around a lot. (I would also suggesting turning off the auto-equip option, as it appears to be random. You get heroes wearing some gear that is fairly useless to them if you let the AI choose who gets what.)

Speaking of credits, I should mention that just about anything in game (power, outfits, stats, etc) can be bought with the S.H.I.E.L.D credits that fall out of bad guys and crates when they're defeated. That's right, we have yet another game where the poor crates and barrels of the world are smashed to oblivion for random item gains. In fact, the credit demands are steep enough that players will feel mildly compelled to smash as many crates as they can. While it's fun at the beginning, it tires fairly quickly, and in many cases it actively detracts from the atmosphere of the mission. “Oh no – they're going to launch a nuke unless we get to the control center! Hold on, there's a cluster of barrels over there. I bet I can get a bunch of credits by smashing those up...” All in all, they should have made less barrels and crates while stuffing more credits in each one. Upping the credit rewards from henchmen would also help, but as it stands you'll waste just as many (if not more) inanimate objects as you will super powered adversaries. I recommend using your AE powers to smash faster – it helps a great deal.

Sound and video
This game makes Ye Olde Xbox look pretty good! There are a few graphical glitches here and there – usually involving transparency that doesn't quite work right. The fighting animations are smooth, and the diverse hero powers are well rendered and generally interesting to look at. Boss battles are fairly impressive, when you get the chance to pay attention to your surroundings rather than fight off giant robots.

The bottom line is that this game is great for comics lovers. Folks that enjoy dissecting powers and building teams will also like it a lot – but fans of pure action games may find it a bit repetitive. The big win here (for me) is really juggling team membership (Fantastic Four! All Avengers! All X-Men! All hot chicks! All blasters! Assault weapons team!), powers, and outfits while you fight in and around the greatest locations in the Marvel universe.