A Lazy Port – No Remastering
The Marvel Ultimate Alliance Bundle came out of nowhere. With no previous news leaks of this re-release outside of a quick mention at a recent convention, the arrival of this bundle was a surprise to me and I’m sure other gamers around the world. The thought of getting a remastered bundled of these two last-gen treats with all included DLC is actually a nice surprise even with the full price tag of $60; used copies of the original game can still be found for very cheap.
Alliance 1 and Alliance 2 have not aged as well as I hoped. The winner here is still Alliance 2 as gameplay is faster, has more content, branching levels with dialog options, and more heroes to battle. It is cool to see all the Marvel heroes and villains in one place but still isn’t as entertaining as a Diablo or a Baldur’s Gate. Both games still have shoddy collision detection and jumping mechanics, and leveling doesn’t really seem to make characters stronger, faster, or enhanced in any way. While Alliance 2’s stages are a little more open ended, there really is no incentive or purpose of exploring. Each stage usually has invisible walls and it is a little disappointing that characters like Iron Man cannot fly over obstacles that are three feet high. The gameplay isn’t exactly solid and the flaws stand out even more here in 2016 than back when they originally launched about a decade ago. Gameplay is little more than simply button mashing. The driving force of these two games is simply seeing your favorite characters on screen, not engrossing gameplay.
See for yourself during my MUA2 stream below:
The important fact to highlight is the exact name of the title – the Marvel Ultimate Alliance Bundle. With this said, this is simply a bundle. This is not an HD remastering or an alternative version with new options or content. These are literally the original games burned into one Xbox One package, which are then installed individually on your dashboard; there isn’t even a hub screen to select between the two games. Activision has made the excuse of “We wanted these re-releases to be as faithful to the original Ultimate Alliance games as possible–the definitive versions.” Basically this means “yeah, we wanted to earn easy money so we just slapped these two games together without doing any work.”
This is the biggest issue with this re-release. The graphics still look like an early last gen game and there are no new options to play through. In fact, this lazy port is even lazier due to the fact that it is still full of bugs and other technical issues. If gamers didn’t install the day-one patch, Achievements would not pop and there are still issues weeks after release with the included DLC. Activision has publicly stated they are working on these issues but mentioned without apology. This bundle is nothing more than the two games sloppy thrown together. But the biggest kick to the nuts is the full $60 retail price. Instead, gamers should just be able to pop in their original 360 discs and play through backwards compatibility on Xbox One instead of being forced to re-buy the two exact same games at full price all over again.
Activision simply needs to do better. They recently published not one but two sub-par licensed games and now are ruining their reputation with fans by re-releasing a buggy mess of non-HD remastered ported games while still demanding full retail price.
4/10
Wait For It: a sale price of $10 when the bugs are patched
Better Than: X-men (NES)
Also Try: the Netflix Dare Devil series
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
Twitter: @ZackGaz
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