Review #679: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 - The Black Order

 Jokes galore. Marvel, it's time to stop.

 A few years ago I went through the first three Ultimate Alliance games(X-men Legends 1 and 2 are part of the series) and discover that they hadn't aged all too well. Well, it's back in the form of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 - The Black Order, a diablo-lite dungeon crawler featuring the most popular  characters from the Marvel Universe in the modern era. Developed by a Japanese company, Tecmo-Koei, it's a different flavor from what we were used to.

 Just like MUA 2 adapter, fairly loosely, the 'Civil War' storyline, The Black Order is an adaptation of Infinity War, albeit a fresh new take. While it borrows a lot from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the unnecessarily large amounts of childish humor, it also adds a ton of characters that haven't made the jump into the big screen, like the Inhumans or even Thane, Thanos' son. The game features gorgeous cutscenes, and the art-direction they went with is just perfect, it's a shame the game can't stay serious for longer than three seconds. On another note, the game is made up of 10 chapters, each one focusing on a different series or world from the Marvel Universe, so there's a lot of variety and familiar faces, comic book dorks like me are in for a treat.

 Like in previous games, you'll play as a 4-man team made up from a 36-character roster. The character selection is great, even if it features mostly popular characters, and has the most amount of characters in the series yet. That said, costumes were cut entirely, replaced by simple, and somewhat lame, recolors. Each character gets a single unlockable recolor, which is rather lame, but we were promised free costumes through updates, so I guess that's somethin'.

 Characters get a weak attack combo string as well as a strong attack that can be used to finish you weak attack combo at any moment. This strong attack is always the same, no matter when you link it, which is rather boring, but nothing that makes or breaks the game. Each character also has 4 energy-consuming super moves. A few super moves can synergize with other characters' super moves in order to deal more damage. In Single Player you can hold down the Z button to have the nearest CPU use a compatible move, if they have any, at the same time. You can level up these super moves up to three times each, but by level 55 you'll have all of them maxed. Lastly, besides your Health and your Energy bar, you've also got a third gauge, filled by dealing and receiving damage, which lets you use an Extreme attack. Lastly, the L button can be used to either block or dodge incoming attacks.

 The most controversial addition to the game is the 'stagger' gauge. Every boss, as well as a bunch of enemy types will feature a purple gauge below their health bar. If you want to deal anything besides chip damage, you'll have to deplete their stagger gauge, so that they'll get stunned and receive extra damage. Failing to capitalize on the stagger gauge will make the game harder on you than it should, as for me, I never had much trouble since my team had at least two great stagger-breakers with Psylocke and Iron Fist, not to mention that Star-Lord can pretty much synergize with anyone, which also deals extra damage to the stagger gauge. Yes, different characters have different styles, some may have great crowd-control super moves but also lack any efficient stagger-damage moves.

 The RPG mechanics have found themselves a bit diluted this time around, so you might as well consider this game a beat'em up with RPG mechanics. Characters level up and get stat bonuses, but equipment is the gone, so the only real customization you can do is with ISO-8 Crystals, objects that can be found defeating enemies or breaking stuff, that can be equipped on your characters for various passive buffs. There's also an Alliance Upgrade Grid, which has a ton of passive bonuses, but require leveling up characters to use. If you stick to a single team of characters you might be lucky to fill a single hexagon on the grid, for you see, Enhancement Points, the currency used in this menu, is earned when characters level up, and once they reach 70 they only start doling out 1 EP per level up. That said....

 The game has been accused of being a bit on the tough side. Can't say I relate! Full disclosure, I went against my principles and purchased the season pass which gave me early access to a level 20 Deadpool. But I never felt like I was relying on him, and my levels evened out pretty quickly. By the time I reached the Dormamu fight all my characters were pretty evened when it came to levels, and I defeated him just fine. As long as you don't ignore the Stagger gauge and make proper use of dodges you can do just fine. I was having so much fun with the game, that every time I unlocked new Infinity Ridge challenges I would stop my progress to clear them. These things even reward you with XP cubes that you can then use to get free XP. I'll admit that a few of the final challenges, including the ones that unlock the 36th character were very darn tough, so tough that I cheesed them by using XP cubes to level up my characters when they were near death, which instantly refilled their health and energy gauges. But as far as the main game goes, I didn't have much trouble on the normal difficulty setting.

 While the game can definitely get pretty repetitive, I mean, characters have pretty limited movesets and the game encourages you to stick to one team, or so I've been led to believe due to the many complaints regarding the difficulty, I had a lot of fun. The game looks fantastic, it's very colorful and very stylized, with cartoony, but detailed character models that are a pleasure to look at. And you get to visit a lot of different locales from the Marvel universe, as well as fight a ton of well known villains. Beating up baddies also felt pretty rewarding, and felt good. It was always pretty neat to clear room full of enemies by spamming my best crowd-clearing super moves.

 If I can praise the game somehow, it's by saying this: As soon as I finished the game I did the same thing I did with my two favorite games I played this year, Dead Cells and Devil May Cry V, I just played it again. I went into the newly unlocked difficulty setting and set out to unlock more colors and the tougher Infinity Ridge challenges. I also took the 36th character, who comes unlocked at level 80, and used him to level up my weaker characters as to get more Enhancement points to get more passive buffs for my main team. And I had a ton of fun doing so. The game's futures is paved with both free DLC(Colossus and Cyclops as well as costumes) and paid DLC(Fantastic four and Marvel knights themed) and I can't wait to give them a try. Nintendo got themselves a solid exclusive with Ultimate Alliance 3, and this game is exactly what we should expect from modern-day licensed videogames.
 8.0 out of 10