Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 Ranking: B
Note: this review is base game only + free updates, so I’m not covering any paid DLC.
Despite the “3” in the title, this game isn’t connected plot-wise to its predecessors. Instead, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 follows their gameplay, an ARPG where the player controls a party of four Marvel superheroes chosen out of a large roster. The plot of the game takes after the MCU’s adapted story arc of Thanos attempting to gather all six Infinity Stones and the heroes attempting to stop him.
We begin following the Guardians of the Galaxy, who stumble upon a Kree warship. They investigate and fall into a trap set by Nebula and Ronan the Accuser, who remark they hadn’t set the trap for the Guardians, but instead for someone else. Rather than explain further, they attack, and after the player kicks their asses, two members of the Black Order show up. It turns out that sometime before the beginning of the game, Nebula and Ronan got all six Infinity Stones in an effort to keep them away from Thanos. Rather than split them up and hide/secure them throughout the universe, they decided to collect them all into one place (the Kree ship) and set a trap consisting of a small handful of Kree soldiers, some mines, and an easily-destroyed force field. Note the Guardians stumble unwittingly into this trap and get out of it (under the player’s control), so if the Black Order had fallen into the trap as planned, they likely would’ve had no trouble exploding Nebula into an actual nebula along with the entire rest of the ship. Man these guys are idiots.
…Anyway, Peter Quill manages to grab the Space Stone and he teleports the Guardians and the other Stones to Earth. There, the Guardians meet up with other heroes, opening the roster up. The roster is pretty varied and includes some relatively unknown characters, such as Crystal and Elsa Bloodstone. The game does a good job – most of the time – of knitting a breadth of locations and characters from the Marvel universe into something coherent. The plot has some eyebrow-raising segments, such as the beginning that I made fun of, but it’s serviceable.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. Much of the action is reasonably fun and I really enjoyed some of the powers, such as Kamala Khan’s Extreme where she embiggens herself and then stomps enemies with her now-gigantic feet. Other times, the game leans into its stunlock mechanics, which it has the absolute largest boner for, and combines them with a terrible camera to serve up a very frustrating time.
To the game’s credit, eventually the developers raised the level cap to 300 from the original 100, meaning the player could overcome the frustrating aspects by grinding levels. That sounds like a negative, but I actually like that – the game lets you slowly but steadily level to a cap so high that you can eventually trivialize most of the content. Enemies that used to kill you by stunlock now just annoy you. It’s a great sense of progression and reward for diligence.
The grind itself, though, isn’t implemented well at all. You grind by doing Infinity Rifts, which are segments from the main story with different constraints, such as a time limit or increased damage from all sides. The setup is rather uninspired and some of the constraints are incredibly annoying, especially when we get timed stages along with the game’s beloved stunlock mechanics. But that’s not necessarily an issue for grinding, since there’re only one or two stages good for grinding, so you can more-or-less ignore most other stages. The problem comes in the game’s bafflingly long loading times. You’ll spend about as long looking at a loading screen as you will actually playing the game, which breaks up the momentum and makes grinding far more tedious than it needs to be.
It gets worse. The other way you increase the power of your team comes in the form of ISO-8, randomly dropped crystals with random affixes, such as increased stats or health regeneration. Right off the bat, a key component of your team’s power is completely RNG-based, which is bad. But it gets worse. The game gives you ISO-8 liberally. Your ISO-8 inventory has a maximum capacity of 1000 and if you hit that cap, the game will not let you play until you free up space, so every once in awhile you need to do a long, tedious bout of breaking down ISO-8. For some god-forsaken reason, you can only break down 10 ISO-8 at a time, so unless you’re constantly going into your inventory to manage your ISO-8, you’ll spend long blocks of time just hitting the Y button ≤ 10 times, then hitting the R button to dismantle, then repeating. Either way, it completely demolishes the momentum of the game. The ISO-8 system is easily the most tedious part of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.
Here’re the MVPs of my playthrough – Ms. Marvel and the Wasp. They have a Synergy attack where Ms. Marvel uses her Giant Foot Spinny Thing (yes, that’s the name of the attack – Kamala Khan is made of pure win) and the Wasp shoots projectiles into it, spraying energy bolts all over the place and absolutely melting enemies.
Note: this review is base game only + free updates, so I’m not covering any paid DLC.
Despite the “3” in the title, this game isn’t connected plot-wise to its predecessors. Instead, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 follows their gameplay, an ARPG where the player controls a party of four Marvel superheroes chosen out of a large roster. The plot of the game takes after the MCU’s adapted story arc of Thanos attempting to gather all six Infinity Stones and the heroes attempting to stop him.
We begin following the Guardians of the Galaxy, who stumble upon a Kree warship. They investigate and fall into a trap set by Nebula and Ronan the Accuser, who remark they hadn’t set the trap for the Guardians, but instead for someone else. Rather than explain further, they attack, and after the player kicks their asses, two members of the Black Order show up. It turns out that sometime before the beginning of the game, Nebula and Ronan got all six Infinity Stones in an effort to keep them away from Thanos. Rather than split them up and hide/secure them throughout the universe, they decided to collect them all into one place (the Kree ship) and set a trap consisting of a small handful of Kree soldiers, some mines, and an easily-destroyed force field. Note the Guardians stumble unwittingly into this trap and get out of it (under the player’s control), so if the Black Order had fallen into the trap as planned, they likely would’ve had no trouble exploding Nebula into an actual nebula along with the entire rest of the ship. Man these guys are idiots.
…Anyway, Peter Quill manages to grab the Space Stone and he teleports the Guardians and the other Stones to Earth. There, the Guardians meet up with other heroes, opening the roster up. The roster is pretty varied and includes some relatively unknown characters, such as Crystal and Elsa Bloodstone. The game does a good job – most of the time – of knitting a breadth of locations and characters from the Marvel universe into something coherent. The plot has some eyebrow-raising segments, such as the beginning that I made fun of, but it’s serviceable.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. Much of the action is reasonably fun and I really enjoyed some of the powers, such as Kamala Khan’s Extreme where she embiggens herself and then stomps enemies with her now-gigantic feet. Other times, the game leans into its stunlock mechanics, which it has the absolute largest boner for, and combines them with a terrible camera to serve up a very frustrating time.
To the game’s credit, eventually the developers raised the level cap to 300 from the original 100, meaning the player could overcome the frustrating aspects by grinding levels. That sounds like a negative, but I actually like that – the game lets you slowly but steadily level to a cap so high that you can eventually trivialize most of the content. Enemies that used to kill you by stunlock now just annoy you. It’s a great sense of progression and reward for diligence.
The grind itself, though, isn’t implemented well at all. You grind by doing Infinity Rifts, which are segments from the main story with different constraints, such as a time limit or increased damage from all sides. The setup is rather uninspired and some of the constraints are incredibly annoying, especially when we get timed stages along with the game’s beloved stunlock mechanics. But that’s not necessarily an issue for grinding, since there’re only one or two stages good for grinding, so you can more-or-less ignore most other stages. The problem comes in the game’s bafflingly long loading times. You’ll spend about as long looking at a loading screen as you will actually playing the game, which breaks up the momentum and makes grinding far more tedious than it needs to be.
It gets worse. The other way you increase the power of your team comes in the form of ISO-8, randomly dropped crystals with random affixes, such as increased stats or health regeneration. Right off the bat, a key component of your team’s power is completely RNG-based, which is bad. But it gets worse. The game gives you ISO-8 liberally. Your ISO-8 inventory has a maximum capacity of 1000 and if you hit that cap, the game will not let you play until you free up space, so every once in awhile you need to do a long, tedious bout of breaking down ISO-8. For some god-forsaken reason, you can only break down 10 ISO-8 at a time, so unless you’re constantly going into your inventory to manage your ISO-8, you’ll spend long blocks of time just hitting the Y button ≤ 10 times, then hitting the R button to dismantle, then repeating. Either way, it completely demolishes the momentum of the game. The ISO-8 system is easily the most tedious part of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.
Here’re the MVPs of my playthrough – Ms. Marvel and the Wasp. They have a Synergy attack where Ms. Marvel uses her Giant Foot Spinny Thing (yes, that’s the name of the attack – Kamala Khan is made of pure win) and the Wasp shoots projectiles into it, spraying energy bolts all over the place and absolutely melting enemies.