Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review
By Brittany Oppenheimer
After Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 came out in 2009, many fans of the game have been itching to see what will happen next in the M.U.A. franchise. Most people hoped that the third instalment would improve on the story, gameplay, online features, and many other modes that would initially make Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 better than its predecessor.
When the game finally came out for the Nintendo Switch on July 19th, 2019, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 ended up being addictive and fun. But ultimately (no pun intended) it can also be viewed as a semi-decent type of game. Don’t get me wrong. The game is super addictive to play, especially with friends on a giant TV screen. However, M.U.A. does have some flaws that can take the gamer out of the experience altogether.
If you do decide to go out and get this game, there is a lot of great stuff here to keep anyone entertained. For starters, you can play as 36 different characters from multiple franchises. Plus, you can also level them up during the course of the game to make your team stronger. At the beginning, you start out with a handful of heroes like Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Hulk, and a couple of others to play around with. However, the further you progress in the game, the more heroes you will end up unlocking. Doctor Strange, Nightcrawler, Ghost Rider, and Deadpool became some of my favorite unlockable characters to play as and watching them level up and become stronger gave me a great reason to keep playing.
Another plus about this game is the difficulty. This game is really hard! Seriously, I haven’t played a game this difficult in a long time and I’m happy the experience gave me a sense of challenge. When you start the game, you have the choice to play on two different difficulty modes, friendly or mighty. No matter how bad a gamer thinks they are, friendly mode is too easy for any gamer and everyone should begin on the mighty difficulty because of its sense of challenge.
This is present pretty much throughout the whole game, but the difficulty spikes come once you do the Doctor Strange fight. That fight took me an hour to beat because of how much stuff is happening on screen. Pretty much any level after that fight is brutal, you just need to figure out how to beat the fight and what characters you feel will help you do that. My suggestion is to either play with your friends or play online. This is because the AI in this game, unfortunately, is garbage. When you are not playing as one of the other three characters in your party, they always seem to purposely get hit and try their hardest not to avoid an incoming attack.
The cutscenes and voice acting in the game is also fun to watch. The characters are perfectly animated in a way that seems like they are popping right out of a comic book. Every voice actor is spot on when it comes to bringing a character to life (with maybe the exception of Ultron and Drax) and this helps when it comes to connecting the people you’re playing as inside the game.
Now, here are some things you should consider when playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. The camera in this game is terrible. Unless you’re playing online, the camera always seems to be fighting you during the game and this can actually cause you to die when fighting bosses and other small enemies.
M.U.A. can also be repetitive at certain points as well. As someone who plays Scarlet Witch a lot in the game, overtime I have become annoyed whenever I use her main, special attack because she yells “Chaos Control!” every time I use it. Every. Single. Time. You will constantly be using the same moves over and over to defeat each enemy which becomes repetitive quickly. Plus, unlocking characters in Infinity Mode is not fun. Since writing this, I have unlocked all but one of the characters because the game asks too much of me to try to get him. The system involving Infinity mode is also tedious and challenging in all the wrong ways.
The only other thing I will say about this game is the fact that some fights, like the one with Dormammu for example, isn’t hard. It’s just difficult because there are so many enemies on screen at once that it sometimes becomes impossible to grab certain objects to defeat him. This, my friends, isn’t a challenge. This type of boss fight when it comes to difficulty is what I call “cheating,” but that can be debatable. I just didn’t find that fair to the player, plain and simple.
In conclusion, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 is a fun, multiplayer challenge with many enjoyable characters to play as. Though the camera, repetitiveness, and overall unfairness can come off as a little bit of a crutch, I believe this game is still worth your time and you should get a group of friends to play it today.
