Marvel: Ultimate Alliance arrived in 2006 as an action role-playing game with a simple pitch: take the biggest cast Marvel would allow and let players build a team from it. Raven Software developed the primary version and Activision published it. The game is listed on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
Trailer, via IGN.
Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil
The setup is drawn straight from the comics. Doctor Doom unites the Marvel Universe’s most dangerous villains into the Masters of Evil and strikes at S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury sends a distress call, and Captain America, Spider-Man, Thor and Wolverine answer it, saving the Helicarrier from Ultron sentries led by Fin Fang Foom.
Fury gets permission to build a task force, and Iron Man hands over Stark Tower as its headquarters. From there the campaign moves across battlefields. The team heads to the Omega Base, a S.H.I.E.L.D. mobile research facility, and fights MODOK, Crimson Dynamo and Mysterio to stop the base crashing into a dam and launching gamma bombs. Then it is off to Atlantis, where Attuma has usurped Namor and taken control of the Atlanteans’ minds.
Over 140 Marvel Characters
The roster is the selling point. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance features over 140 Marvel characters as playable fighters, bosses or non-player characters. The Raven Software version ships with 23 default playable characters, though some systems get additional fighters the others do not. The Game Boy Advance version is a different animal entirely: 10 playable characters and 6 striker characters.
That spread is both the game’s strength and its limit. A player who wants Nightcrawler or Jean Grey gets them in the story — both are kidnapped alongside Senator Robert Kelly — but the version you bought decides who you can actually control.
The Mandarin and the Loki Reveal
The Atlantis arc ends with a detour. After Attuma falls, the heroes meet Mandarin, who unleashes the Kraken. They topple pillars onto it and fight him in his palace in the Valley of Spirits. Beaten, Mandarin admits he tried to take command of the Masters of Evil, failed, and left the group.
He suggests that the Mandarin they saw in the catacombs was actually Loki, Thor’s adoptive brother and the god of mischief.
That is the kind of turn the game likes: a villain who exists to point at a bigger villain. It keeps the plot moving without asking much of the player.
A Simple, Crowded RPG
Ultimate Alliance shares its bones with Raven Software’s earlier Marvel titles, X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse. Players pick from a vast cast to assemble a superhero team, then work through third-person, co-operative action. Single player and multiplayer are both supported.
In this paper’s view the formula is not deep. It is a role-playing game in structure and a brawler in feel, and the 23-character default roster means most players will find a favorite and lean on it.
What the Cast Cannot Fix
Critics largely praised the game on release, and the cast is the reason to play. The Doom plot gives that cast somewhere to go. In our reading, the Atlantis and Omega Base missions are the high points, and the Loki reveal is the campaign’s best story beat.
What holds it back is the version problem. A launch title split across platforms, with the Game Boy Advance build pared down to 10 playable characters, is not one game — it is several, and in our view the weakest of them undersells the roster. The PlayStation 3 version was one of three launch games for the system to run at 1080p. That is a footnote, not a feature.
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