- Pathetic attacks cannot harm me.
- We weren't trying to hurt you, just to distract you.
- [Tom] It brings me a special kind of joy
to see a yellow spandex-clad Wolverine
straight out of the '90s cartoons
alongside an MCU-style Rocket Raccoon.
That's possible because
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order
pulls from anywhere and everywhere
in the Marvel multiverse to stock its roster.
Heck, Spider-Man is even voiced
by the PS4 game's Yuri Lowenthal.
- It's a total riot.
- [Reviewer] But instead of being jarring,
the result is a very fun, if fairly simple,
co-op comic book brawler
packed full of crowd-pleasing moments.
Okay, you know the drill.
Thanos is yet again hunting for the Infinity Stones,
and you have to find all six before he does.
But even if we've heard this one before,
the new telling is full of cool cutscenes
and writing that captures the funny, self-deprecating,
and occasionally overdramatic attitude
that I love about big comic book stories.
Ultimate Alliance 3's button-mashing beat-'em-up campaign
takes you on a linear tour of iconic places,
like Avengers Tower, The Raft prison,
and even the wonderfully nostalgic Xavier Institute.
The level design is fairly straightforward,
but these locations are loaded with heroes
and villains alike.
There are more than 30 playable characters,
plus occasional NPC-only heroes who fight alongside you,
like Cyclops or Colossus.
But even they're being added as playable characters
in free DLC post-launch.
The big MCU names like Iron Man and Captain America
are playable, of course, but it was also exciting
to be able to control both both longtime X-Men favorites
like Nightcrawler and smaller characters like Ms. Marvel.
- Avengers Assemble, baby!
- [Reviewer] Each of them has a set
of four playstyle-defining abilities,
which can also combo with abilities of other heroes
for powerful synergy attacks.
And while there's a bit of overlap
between similar characters like Peter Parker
and Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen,
they each still have little twists that set them apart,
like Gwen's excellent widespread web shot.
Each hero also has a ridiculously over-the-top
and epic Extreme move that you can chain together
to fill the screen with damage,
which is understandably the only time
I saw Ultimate Alliance 3's frame-rate take a hit.
Apart from their abilities,
every hero has a light, heavy, and aerial attack,
and that's pretty much it.
There's no fancy button attacks or special attack patterns,
so you'll be spamming that chain of light attacks
a whole lot.
That can definitely get stale all on its own,
but larger enemies and bosses makes things more interesting
with a purple stagger bar.
Instead of just whacking them blindly,
you have to first deal stagger damage
to take that bar down,
then use a synergy attack to stun them.
That's when you can deal some real damage.
Figuring out the right balance
of using your ability energy to stagger or stun
is an interesting puzzle,
especially on the Mighty difficulty.
I definitely still wish characters had more attack options,
but I found myself consistently engaged in the combat
the whole way through the campaign and beyond.
And believe it or not, sometimes I actually preferred
playing Ultimate Alliance 3 solo,
mostly thanks to intuitive synergy controls
and awesome heroic camera option
that drops the viewing angle down.
But it still feels like
this was really meant to be played in co-op.
Synergy attacks are trickier to coordinate
with human beings, but being able to multitask
during boss fights is essential on Mighty difficulty.
It can be chaotic snack-food-like entertainment
on the lower Friendly difficulty,
but played with a group that knows what they're doing,
it becomes an exciting coordination challenge
to call out targets and work together
to stagger specific enemies,
while you have a synergy attack waiting in the wings.
One fairly predictable but not game-breaking problem though
is the camera, which frequently feels too restrictive
and is frustratingly stubborn in tight hallways.
As characters level up,
you can rank up their individual abilities,
improve the stats of every hero at once
via a sprawling skill tree,
and equip special ISO-8 crystals for even more stat boosts.
There's a ton to dig into here.
That doesn't mean any of it is very interesting.
Essentially every form of upgrade or modification
in Ultimate Alliance 3 is stat-based,
which means that they're almost entirely invisible to you
while you're actually fighting.
The combined effect of this ever-growing list of buffs
is probably important, but also practically unnoticeable.
The ability rank-ups are also unimaginative,
offering the exact same benefit for nearly every move.
There are a couple of meaningful upgrades
in the sea of marginal stat boosts,
like one that heals my heroes
for the damage they deal during Extreme Attacks.
That actually changed how I played in a tangible way.
But the vast majority are purely number-based buffs.
By the end of the roughly 13 hours
it took me to complete Ultimate Alliance 3,
I had unlocked only about a fifth
of its gargantuan skill tree.
Beating the campaign unlocks an even harder mode
called Superior to replay on.
And beyond that, there are amusing, high-level
Infinity Trials that add rule modifiers
to repurpose campaign sections and boos fights
for bonus unlocks.
There are even a few characters locked in the trials,
like Elektra, as well as a handful of
thoroughly disappointing color-swapped outfits.
While I'm interested in diving back
into some of these harder challenges,
the spice of Ultimate Alliance 3
really is the variety of the characters and their story.
And I don't know how long chasing
numerically stronger versions of them alone
will keep me hooked past the credits.
In yet another take on the Infinity Stone Saga,
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order
is a fun and irreverent comic book story
that pulls from an exceptionally wide pool
of Marvel material.
Its combat systems are fairly simple,
but they were still surprisingly engaging
as I excitedly experimented
with different hero combinations.
And while its vast array of upgrades
and other endgame extras have been uninteresting so far,
this superhero brawler is still a treat to play alone
and with friends alike.
For more on Marvel's Ultimate Alliance 3,
be sure to check out our full written review on IGN.com,
watch highlights from the Ultron boss fight,
or see the 10 heroes we want
from its upcoming DLC expansion packs.
And for everything else, keep it right here on IGN.