Daily Loaf

Video games allow us to simulate amazing feats and experience what it’s like to possess superhuman abilities, or to put it another way – to act like superheroes. Even games like Halo or Call of Duty owe as much to the super-heroic experience as they do to modern warfare. In real life, you can’t just shrug off a burst a machine gun fire by hiding behind a rock for five seconds. That’s a bona fide, Wolverine-style super power. It’s off then that there have been so many bad superhero games over the years. But we’re in a new golden age of such games, and if you read my Batman: Arkham Asylum review then you know it’s possible to make a superhero game that perfectly captures that comic book experience. Batman focused all its efforts on simulating one particular hero. The new Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 takes the opposite approach, offering a whole comic book universe of heroes to choose from in an attempt to recreate the world of Marvel Comics in one giant epic tale.

Ultimate Alliance’s story is drawn straight from two recent cross-over events in Marvel Comics – the Secret War and The Civil War. The Civil War in particular strove to achieve some really interesting political and social relevance with the legal and moral issues facing superheroes mirroring real world debates about freedom vs. security in the age of terror. With Marvel’s heroes split into two camps – Pro-Government led by Iron-Man and Pro-Freedom led by Captain America – the high drama of brother against brother that only comes from a civil war played out in dark, dramatic fashion across the pages of dozens of different comic book titles. This game offers a pretty close (but not by any means exact) version of that story, leaving it to the players as to which side they will support. And of course since it’s a video game, you can always go back and play it again from the other side. Read the rest of this entry »