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Over the last few years, Raven has been enjoying the success of the popular X-Men Legends franchise, which offered gamers an action RPG dungeon crawler starring Marvel’s most famous mutant team. This year, Raven steps the formula up a notch, this time spanning the game across the entire Marvel Universe and calling it Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. The game features over 20 playable heroes from the pages of Marvel Comics, and you’ll have the chance to interact with many, many more. While the scope may have changed, the core gameplay remains largely untouched. Is Ultimate Alliance worth your time, or is it just a Legends re-hash? Read on.

What X-Men Legends lacked was a wide variety of characters. There were always enough to keep gamers satisfied, but there’s only so much you can do when constrained to one team of heroes. Done away with that small barricade, Ultimate Alliance features a whopping 25 playable characters to choose from, most readily available from the start, some which need to be unlocked. The range of characters is sure to please even the most obscure-taste fans, but one can’t help but wonder who exactly made the roster choices. While most of the obvious characters like Spider-Man, Captain America and Wolverine are all here, there’s some fan favorites curiously missing from the mix, Hulk comes to mind as a big one. Instead of adding these high profile heroes, we’re treated to a mixed bag of legendary heroes and the likes of Elektra and Ms. Marvel. How Elektra made the roster, but Hulk makes no playable appearance (Bruce Banner shows up as an NPC) is beyond my comprehension. The most likely explanation is that they were trying to ride off the success (of which there was none) of the movie.

That being said, most of the characters can hold their own in even the most heated battles, given enough time to upgrade their stats and special abilities, though, of course, the more ‘main’ heroes lay waste to enemies much faster and more efficiently, making some of the more minor B-list heroes a wasted addition. Most characters have 4 costumes available, the starter, and 3 that are unlockable via playing as the character. Some characters have pitiful alternate costume choices, like Deadpool and Thing, but to Raven’s defense, these characters don’t really have a history of dawning various outfits. Other characters, such as Spider-Man, Captain America or Wolverine, have a bevy of different costume choices that could be used. The various costumes are more than a mere cosmetic change, which is a bump up from X-Men Legends. This time, each costume has its own independent properties, allowing you to put points into 3 different attributes attached to the costume, such as extra experience earned, higher defense bonus, etc. However, most of the time the benefits aren’t major decision makers, and you’ll find yourself going for the coolest looking costume, regardless of bonuses.

Another cool little piece of customization in the game is the ability to assign characters to your own team. Choose 4 characters to tie together as a team, and anytime you play with at least 3 of those team members, you gain Team Experience, which will, when grouped, give your characters bonuses such as enhanced damage, or health upgrades, while also expanding your available roster slots. It’s a great idea, but it does hamper the idea of playing with a wide variety of characters, as you’ll want to be consistent with your choice of hero so that you can acquire the bonuses.

Ultimate Alliance plays very much like the X-Men Legends titles in that the maps are fairly linear, and your task is to get from point A to point B while pummeling everything in your way while solving a few simple puzzles here and there. Some call it repetitive; some call it prime environment for opening a can of Super Whoop Ass. Booya.

Every character comes complete with at least one special power that is interactive, meaning instead of just firing your power, you can, for example, rapidly press the appropriate button to launch a series of rapid-fire bursts. If special abilities aren’t your cup of tea, you can always snatch weapons right from your enemy’s hands. Run up to a weapon wielding enemy and press the grab button to activate a game of tug’o’war over the weapon. Win, and the weapon becomes yours. Let the bludgeoning begin!

In Legends, one of the more tedious tasks involved with the games team-based mechanics was constantly having to baby sit your teammates’ health and energy. This has been eliminated in Ultimate Alliance, swapping potions for a more efficient orb based recovery system. When you kill an enemy, they may drop red and blue orbs for recovering health and energy, respectively. If your character has full health or energy and they pick up a recovery orb, the benefit is automatically passed on to the next teammate that needs it. Very cool.

The AI is a mixed bag, with the enemies focusing mostly on player controlled characters during battles, which is fine, since that means you get the fun of pummeling the most bad guys, which is good, because the ally AI can be a bit dense at times. During battle, while you beat away on hordes of enemies, sometimes your team will seem to sit back and enjoy the view while you’re surrounded and fighting for your life.

The Boss battles play out somewhat differently than battling regular thugs in that most bosses require you to use some sort of repeating strategy in order to defeat them. Fing Fang Foom, for instance, requires you to shoot him out of the sky with a cannon before you can attack him on the ground. The strategies are never usually difficult to figure out, but it does require some lengthy repetition at times, which can grow a bit tedious. In theory, it’s a great way to keep the game from feeling monotonous, but some more care could have been taken to ensure that the strategies kept from getting old after a while.

Of course with the good always comes the bad, and in Ultimate Alliance, the bad comes in terms of the level design and ‘puzzles’ you encounter during the game. The level design isn’t bad, but it is still very straight forward, and feels plucked right out of the Legends playbook, opposed to being fresh, as much of the rest of the game is. The puzzle elements, however, are laughable. I thought we were past the days when smashing generators was considered a puzzle, but apparently, there’s still a few that thought otherwise. Of course one could argue that the puzzles are made simplistic as to not bog down the action-oriented gameplay, and that would be a fine point to make indeed, but if they were going to make them this simple, they should have done away with them altogether and just given us more bad guys to pummel.

Then there’s the added benefit of playing Ultimate Alliance online with friends, enemies and perfect strangers. Online, gamers load up one of their save files and everyone plays from that. This allows for something of an even playing field, so if your team is made up of level 30 characters and you’re playing with someone new to the game, you aren’t stealing all their early level kills and laying waste to everything in sight. An extra goody packed in is that you can save your online profile and so can everyone you play with, allowing them to continue the adventure later on with or without you. The only noteworthy downside is that you can only have one online player per console, so there’s no you and a buddy vs 2 other players, it has to be one player per console. It’s a shame, but something that can be improved on in future installments.

Visually speaking, there is no competition between Ultimate Alliance and the Legends series. Where Legends offered cel-shaded versions of their comic counterparts, Ultimate Alliance offers up a fresh crop of fully rendered characters ripe with the smallest details. The environments are full of beautiful special effects, and the enemies encountered are varied and worthy of the Marvel association. The game also has several incredible CG cut scenes peppered throughout for good measure, and man… do they ever impress.

The game sounds decent. Not terrible, not incredible, just decent. The voice acting is stale, with the dialogue sounding like it was found on the cutting room floor at the Marvel editing offices, and the actual delivery sounds like Raven hired B movie stars to voice the characters. To add to the pain is the fact that every character comes with a handful of one-liners that you’ll hear a million times before you’ve beaten the first few levels. The soundtrack is your typical action game fare, with nothing standing out as especially noteworthy.

Ultimate Alliance is a huge step up from the X-Men Legends series, but it still has a few nagging flaws that keep it from being truly fantastic. Thankfully these flaws don’t get in the way of having fun, and Ultimate Alliance is all about sitting down with some friends and pummeling an encyclopedia worth of Marvel’s greatest (and not so greatest) villains. It’s also the first game in a long time that has ever given me a worthwhile reason to repeatedly use the word pummel, so it gets the thumbs up from me.