E3 2019 - Hands on with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

If there was one game that I wanted to get hands on with at E3, it was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, as the previous entries in the series were a blast to play and I was keen to see if Nintendo could capture that same magic, from my time with the game, it seems they have.

The demo started, by letting me select a team of heroes, there were some presets or the option of changing them to what I wanted, but I left with the default, which gave me Wolverine, Iron Man, Thor and Captain Marvel, quit the line up to be sure. The mission that I had to complete, had my team catching up with Jessica Jones, who had intel about the Hand and their occupation of New York, so with fresh intel to go off, it was time to enter the fight for real. What is interesting about the game is just how much it feels like the old ones, while there are some special attacks that feel amped up, the overall quality is that this is a true continuation of the series, so long time fans won’t have to worry about that.

Getting into combat did not change anything, the screen just flooded with enemies and gave me plenty of bashing to do, all the attacks are done as either a light or heavy variant, but you have some special ones that you can utilize as well, these can take out more foes at once, but require a little time to get them going. I never found that there was any real challenge to the game, there were times when I got knocked down, but a quick recovery and I was back into the action. As the stage progressed, there was some light smashing of boxes to clear the way, before more bashing of the bad guys That just continued to pile on two the screen.

One thing that I did like is it the camera was far enough away that I could see all the action but still close enough that I could make out who was who, and given how chaotic some of the skirmishes were, that's no mean feat. Perhaps the cameras only issue that I really found during my play through was that it would go from being top down to isometric then on to side scrolling before going back to something again no real way to manipulate it myself and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that yet.

Though I did primarily play as Wolverine I could press a direction on the D pad to change to a different character doing that obviously opened up new move sets and abilities but also very the special attacks that were available. Unleashing a special attack was done by combination of buttons but in order to actually do it one needed to build up enough points to fill the metre that is done simply by beating up enemies the more you defeat the first the bar fills and then the more of the special attacks use. Highway through the level they would giant blue Shield logos left on the roofs are various building by accessing these it gave me the ability to change members of the team and why did going to want to see what it does I didn't stay in there at all because I only had 10 minutes and I wanted to beat up although get bad guys I could.

While the main focus of the mission was getting to the location and beating up everybody along the way there was a small section the required me to avoid being spotted by giant searchlights, if you do get spotted (which I did almost all the time) it would actually go ahead and drop him of bombs around you, dealing a lot of damage and then the ninjas would appear, it was a little variety and I liked it. Of course, this was only one single mission and even then, only a small portion of one mission so the final product might be a larger and require different tactics to complete. Regardless of the size of the battles there was just something brutally fun about whaling on me after enemy as Wolverine is known to do, but even still I'm hoping there's a little more to the game.

My time with the game was short, which is par for the course at E3, but I walked away excited for the game, but also a little despondent on it. The game has the pedigree, of the license, the publisher and developer, so all the ingredients are there, it just is a matter of time to see if they can become something wonderful.