It has been a number of years since we got a Marvel game that provided a long story, with a massive cast of characters, at least that weren’t Lego’d and even longer since the Ultimate Alliance series was around and now that both are back, does it mean the future for Marvel games is looking up?

The story centres around the Infinity Stones, those pesky little gems that gave headaches to all in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while the base story sounds similar to what we saw on the big screen, it is quite a bit different. Where as the MCU told a much more focused tale, I know that many movies and I call it focused, MUA3 tales a story that is infinitely vaster and more expensive than you might think. Starting out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, they are having a usual debate about the state of their previous mission, which ended with Rocket Racoon stealing something, only for an alarm to sound. It turns out Rocket installed a new scanner, which could detect certain radiations and tracing it back the source, the team of misfits, find Nebula and some Kree soldiers on a ship, and as Gamora and Nebula can’t be nice to each other, they fought.

Turns out that they had stolen the Infinity Stones and were trying to keep them hidden, but the Guardians arrival, tipped off the Black Order and they soon arrived. After a brief skirmish, the stones were exposed from their containment vessel and in order to stop them from being grabbed by the baddies, Star-Lord reached out and grabbed the Space stone, that’s the blue one, this caused all the Guardians and the Stones to be whisked away to Earth. This is the beginning of an adventure that spans some of the most iconic locations in the Marvel universe and stars a whose who of characters to match. As soon as the Guardians arrive on Earth, they meet Spider-Man, from there, it is Spider-Gwen, Ms Marvel and Spider-Man, the Miles Morales version and then Iron Man and more, the cast just gets bigger and bigger as the game progresses and they are introduced in a nice way, especially how they explain the ability to swap around between them.

Once you are out and exploring though, things take a fairly linear approach, you run through a corridor, or down a narrow path, into an open space and then beat on all the enemies who spawn near you. Once you have cleared the enemies, you press on and do the same in the next room and the next, it is pretty repetitive on how you progress through the game. Thankfully, the enemies that you fight do offer up a lot of variety, not only in their attacks, but also where they come from and while the earlier enemies are human, with a little more mixed in, the game quickly adds more to the mix. Each enemy has a health bar, but the ones that have more strength, or skill, have another bar beneath it, a purple one, which you need to deplete first, in order to dish up any sort of damage to them. This can be done by either just attacking with your basic attacks or using one of the skill attacks that your character possesses, some attacks do more damage to some opponents, so finding out what works best, is something you need to do constantly.

Once the bar is gone, it begins to refill and depending on the type of enemy you are fighting, it might take a while or fill up quite fast, but while it is doing that, you can beat on them, taking out a lot more health than before. The system takes a bit of getting used to, but once you have a pattern down pat, you will be able to take on most foes with ease, but as the game gets towards the end, things get much, much more challenging. Not only do you get more enemies with the purple bar, but the bosses will have segments of health, meaning that you are clearing out one part, is just a smaller portion of the fight. As I said before, the problem with the gameplay is that you fight, and then fight some more and then finally fight again, there are a few light puzzle elements sprinkled within, moving boxes and such, but it is usually just fighting. The exception to this are the character attack puzzles, these require two attacks, done within moments of each other, the attacks appear to be at random, and doing them solo, is possible, just with a little more challenge. The rewards that you get for breaking down a wall or busting open a special cage, is some ISO-8 or Orbs.

These elements are used in character progression, the orbs can be used to upgrade your skills for characters, something you can do whenever you want via the pause menu. The ISO-8 however, requires access to a S.H.I.E.L.D. point in order to make the most out of it, the base level of these gems, will grant buffs to characters, increasing melee damage, mastery increase, health bonuses and so on, but if you want, you can break them down to base elements and then use those to craft all new ISO-8 gems. This is a system that sounds pretty basic, but understanding what gems are best to have equipped for each character is important, as they can make a big different, for example, equipping a buff that increases health regen, on a character like Deadpool or Wolverine, is a little bit of a waste, as they constantly regen health anyway, it would be better used elsewhere. As you can equip and unequip them at any time, if you find that a set is not working for you, then you can simply swap them out.

The character skills though, require a little more thought, as you can undo them all, if you make a mistake, but doing that means you have to redo everything and that can take some time. As you level up, each character will earn some skill points that can be used to upgrade attacks and investing in these attacks is something to take your time in, as not every character is worthy of the time to do so. As you level up, each character you play as, gets stronger, basic game design there, however the characters you don’t play as, remain at the level they were, when you last used them, which means if you leave Drax or Iron Man out of things from the early parts of the game, bringing them into the battle near the end, will have them at a massive disadvantage from the rest, as their health will be lower, but the amount of power that is behind there attacks will also be lagging behind.

You can take the characters into the Infinity Rifts that are around the place, as well as from the games main menu, and in there, you can replay them as many times as you like in order to gain more xp for the underused characters. This however feels a bit cheap, as it is more akin to ignoring the main quest line, to just grind some experience for a minor character and given how many characters there are in the game, you will likely only find one or two extras, on top of your base four that are worthy of that level of attention. The other factor to consider, though slightly less so, is that each character has two types of attributes, one is their special skills, like Deadpool’s healing or Storm’s flying, but they also have their others, Strength, Vitality and so on. These latter ones are the important ones as each skill can be buffed, if you join two or more characters with a similar connection, i.e. if you have Iron-Man and Doctor Strange, they might gain the enhancement for being smart, but if you have the good doctor and Scarlett Witch, they will have one for energy and then again, if you have Scarlett Witch and Ms Marvel, you will get a Women of Marvel bonus. The more that you have of the same type, the larger that buff for your entire squad will be, which can impact things in your favour, if you take the time to make use of it.

When you look at the game, it is easy to see its comic influence, the entire game sports a very unique look, that helps emphasis the comic background, but also blends it with a modern look. Each item, character and structure of the world has a black line that edges around it, but depending on where the camera is placed, that line can disappear, much like a line would on paper. The effect is something that you will not notice at first, as it is quite subtle, but once you see it, the overall impact is made that much clearer. The character designs are also quite nice and harken more to the comic books, than the recent MCU iterations, with Gamora being the easiest to see the difference in. But that is not to say that the movies have not been referenced, Ant-Mans suit is more like his current movie appearance than the comics, so it is more like the best of both worlds.

There are however some issues with the look of the game, mostly due to the camera and lighting, starting with the latter, the lighting looks amazing most of the time, but there are a handful of times when it behaves oddly and when you tie that in with the visual style, you can some very weird effects. The shadows are the major elements that suffer when this happens, and instead of the crisp visuals that are normally present, you get janky and blocky shadows and they are really noticeable. The other issue comes from the camera and its desire to pan into walls or through objects to get into place for you, as there are times when you don’t have control of the camera, it will move from where you had it, to where it needs to be and this is when it usually occurs. However, there are also times when it moves from one fixed perspective to another and in those times, it does happen as well, the worst issue that I saw was that the camera appeared to be stuck in a wall, it only lasted for a few seconds, but it stood out.

The visuals themselves are fine, where the game falls apart is the audio, the music itself is fine, the score, especially the main theme has a ton of elements that pull from other Marvel sources and even if you think it sounds similar to something else, the overall theme is its own and I enjoyed it. The voice cast is where things fall apart and I can’t understand why, there are so many characters that have already has voices cast for them, that not getting them in here, makes no sense. Nolan North is back as Deadpool and Rocket Racoon, Laura Bailey is Black Widow and Vanessa Marshall as Gamora, they all play these characters in other mediums and they have nailed them. Yuri Lowenthal returns as Spider-Man, after nailing it in 2018’s Spider-Man on PlayStation 4 and is even joined by Nadji Jeter who is returning as Mile Morales from the game, as well as playing the character in the latest Spider-Man cartoon, there is even the incredible Fred Tatasciore as Hulk.

The problem is that a lot of the other characters, don’t have their usual cast and the voices, while different sound fine, they just sound poor in comparison. The voice of Thor should be booming and brash, but for some reason, the actor that is portraying him here, makes it sound like someone just learning Shakespeare. The voice of M.O.D.O.K. is one that should feel mechanical and evil at once, but for some reason, it fails to deliver even an ounce of either, which is a shame as when you consider that Ultron and Red Skull are voiced by Jim Meskimen and Liam O’Brien respectively, both who nail the roles. It is not just those characters, from the first trailer, the voice of Nick Fury sounded cheap, it honestly is not a voice anyone could take seriously as the leader of a multinational spy organisation and each time I heard that one, or any other of the number of poor voices, I disconnected from the game.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a fine game, it keeps the spirit of the previous entries going, but adds so much to it that it makes it feel like its own game. The lack of equal progression for all characters, means that most of the roster will end up, being left alone, especially in the latter game, which is a shame as most have some incredible moves. The games visuals are almost perfect, bar the occasional lighting blemish, but the audio is a mixed bag and sadly sounds bad more than it does good. Fans of the series will love the diverse cast and incredible story, as the game is a sampler box of Marvel goodness, I just wish it was a top quality one.