I like a good dungeon crawl.



MUA2 has been streamlined substantially from the first Ultimate Alliance and while some might not approve, I feel it makes the game a better experience. Characters no longer have three or four different costumes with different powers and stats and, honestly, I think this helps the game. While it was nice that I could switch out Ghost Rider for Vengeance or the ghostly cowboy classic Ghost Rider in MUA1, it always felt like I was deciding between which couple of good powers I wanted to dig out of the slurry of stuff I didn't care about and if it was worth giving up the stuff I already knew how to use. Now they can just make all the powers useful since they stay the same, and I can play as Deadpool or plastic skull face Ultimate!Deadpool at my leisure. I'm fine with this. The buffs that went with costumes before have been replaced and similarly streamlined by passives. Choosing pro-reg or anti-reg in the story unlocks one or two either way. It might be a little weak making us replay the game to completely unlock all the character stats, but not any more so than jumping through hoops to unlock costumes.



There is much less of an emphasis on character builds as well. In MUA1, you were either using normal Ghost Rider with as much as you could put into hellfire and penance stare, or you were denying yourself an infinite firebombing machine. Now that the power lists have been trimmed and the costumes are only cosmetic, I was able to edit the characters more around how I wanted to use them instead of how the devs thought I should. As an added bonus, no one will spend time carefully statting and equipping their team just to have the AI not know what the hell it's doing.



The special “fusion” attacks can be repetitive, but if Juggernaut is included, the developers would have been required to create 276 unique and useful fusion moves. For example, lets say your team is Deadpool, Luke Cage, Juggernaut and Green Goblin. The Pool & Cage fusion is basically identical to the Goblin & Juggs fusion, but they both involve one super strong character and one character with grenades. I would have liked more variety, but will take “this is always effective” over 250 completely useless, “why do you even have him on your team?” fusions.

The graphics are... acceptable? They won't be wowing anyone all the time, but there were a few times that the camera was in the right place and the environment looked right and I talked to an NPC and got a pretty well animated, decently textured dialog sequence. Most of the time, the camera is much further back anyway. I was never blown away, but I never wondered if it was Bring Your Child To Work And Let Them Ruin Your Game Day at the studio; a resounding “eh, fine, I guess.” I'm not losing sleep over a dungeon crawler lacking individually rendered buttons on clothing.



It's hard for me to judge the quality of the story, as I thought the actual Civil War event was handled poorly. If what I heard is correct, it was supposed to lead readers to initially side with the anti-registration group and then bring things around and see how having a bunch of weirdos with superpowers running around with masks and without any accountability was bad, then side with the pro-registration. The wrench thrown into the works there was that the generally liberal writers were living in a country with a conservative president that was doing a shit job. The idea of a government doing something reasonable was abhorrent to them so they shoehorned in Iron Man doing a bunch of horrible, unreasonable things while the people fighting against the SHRA were valiant paragons of freedom that absolutely weren't led by a hypocrite. I suppose it's a good excuse for a bunch of characters to be slapped into a team and beat the insides out of a bunch of mooks, but whether you enjoy the narrative is going to be up in the air. It's very video-gamey.



Coming in near the bottom of the quality scale are the sound and character interactions. The sound effects are very “effecty”; explosions aren't explosions,they're explosion sound effects. The same goes for swords, guns, fists and generally everything else. It doesn't hurt the experience like it would have in other games or other genres, but Killzone 2 this is not. The dialog is weirdly forced, casual and impersonal. There's a little personality presented in the different options you're given, but you'll still get murderous supervillains chatting it up with heroes in a surreal, chummy way.

I only hit one bug while playing through.and I simply restarted from my last (very recent) checkpoint and all was good from there on.

**If any of my fellow PS3-owning dtoiders want to give Legendary difficulty a shot, search for hidden items or just punch dudes, my ID is in the sidebar and my goblin glider is warming up. I'm interested in trying the online play. Download the Juggernaut compatability pack from the PS Store and we're in business.**