Well... it's an interesting experiment to say the least!
While far from technical
marvels, the Ultimate Alliance saga wasn't something
I'd have thought a good fit for the Nintendo DS, yet Activision likes the smell of money and having had one of the largest installbases for a videogame console during its era, porting the game to the DS was a
no-brainer. The end result is lackluster... but it's also interesting how they managed to
cram the brunt of the game into a tiny DS cart.
Ultimate Alliance 2 loosely follows the Civil War storyline from the comics, but only for a little while before introducing Nanites and it's zombie-like disease which forces heroes, villains, allies and enemies to work together and stop the
infestation. The DS' version of the plot is very
flimsy and little time and attention is spent treading each story thread. Heck, one of the home console version's selling points was that each path offered exclusive characters and stages, but in the DS version there's only one unique mission for each path and by the end of the game you'll have the
full 15-character roster at your disposal... probably a
consequence of having a single save-file and no New Game+. The DS version's
noteworthy for being the only one to have the Sentry and She-Hulk as playable characters.
The game deserves
praise for keeping in-tact so much about the console game. You still play as a four-man team of your choosing and go from dungeon to dungeon beating enemies for experience points. The entire control scheme is kept
intact: Weak and Strong attacks, a grab attack and the jump all done with the face buttons, press L to block and hold R and press face buttons for the four different
abilities. Whereas the console game had four different attack abilities, in the DS version there're 3 attacks and 1 buff. As you'd expect, defeating enemies earns you experience which eventually lets your characters level up. With each level up you earn a single ability point to spend enhancing your four active skills or the two passive skills. Auto-assigning ability points is also set on by default.
which sucks so bad, but it can be turned off.
Sadly, Equipment/Boosts are gone entirely, so there's no way to customize your four man-squad.
But not everything's perfect, as you'd expect having your four-man team on-screen is pretty
taxing on the poor DS, and once enemies get into the picture... let's just say that the framerate is pretty
bad, you'll play the entire game in sub-20 FPS. Since the DS has no analog of any kind, there's no way to turn the camera around, which you can get
used to, but it's still pretty
sub-optimal. There's also the fact that there's no mini-map of any sort, and while you can access the map by pressing select, it's pretty
laggy. Navigation
could've been even more annoying, but the devs took this shortcomings in mind, so levels are pretty straightforward, which has the inevitable result of making stages feel bland and repetitive.
Beating enemies also makes them drop health and mana orbs, just as in
previous games, but new, yellow blobs as well that serves to charge a new five-star gauge. You can use this gauge to perform 'fusion attacks'(Which look so bad and choppy on the DS that you don't even
know what's going on, but it deals a lot of damage so who cares!) or revive fallen characters. The AI is pretty bad, one too many times I found them using their powers and wasting mana on thin air, and they seem to have trouble following you through
doorways. The game's difficulty is pretty
spotty as well, this one time I entered a double boss battle and was destroyed in a few seconds flat, tried again and I managed to defeat the same two bosses
very easily. Regardless, expect to be reviving allies pretty often, either due to their own idiocy or because the game just decided to become hard for
no reason whatsoever.
Being a DS game, the developers introduced a few tap minigames. The most annoying one being the bomb disarm/computer hacking one, which the game doesn't properly
explain how to perform. I had to look online for an explanation, and was happy to find out that I wasn't the only one
suffering through the first one. And some bosses will have you tapping the screen too, without any warning beforehand, which is really dumb since I have to pop-out the stylus at a moment's notice. Or use my fat finger, which isn't always precise enough.
While Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 on the DS isn't very good, I can't help but
appreciate how well they managed to translate everything to inferior hardware. A few kinks needed addressing, making the AI allies less dumb, maybe allowing you to move the camera around by holding the L button,
like the PSP did, allowing for more nuanced level design, maybe having a mini-map on the lower screen instead of having a
needless HUD, and removing the touch-screen mini-games, at leas the ones involving bosses. I mean, the inferior hardware pretty much makes a direct translation impossible, but a lot more could've been done to polish this game.
4.0 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment