@RobBex2
MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 3: THE BLACK ORDER (Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo/Nintendo – Switch – July 19) – Finally! We are getting a new Ultimate Alliance after a decade of waiting, and a decade of disappointing Marvel video game reveals at Comic-Con… Mobile games, card games, puzzle games, even an underwhelming Marvel vs. Capcom game; no more! Marvel is aiming to follow up on the lone smash hit that was Insomniac’s Spider-Man, and from the looks of it, they just might have found it…
Story wise, we’ll be playing our own version of Avengers: Endgame — just without all the death. The villains look to be Thanos, his Black Order and maybe a few surprises here and there (Loki being one of them). The gameplay appears to be a return to form (i.e. having fun with a hint of button mashing), but it’s all fun and games until you start to get to the harder bosses where your leveling and upgrading better be up to par. Just as before, you get to play with four characters of your choosing and if you pair them up properly, you create a “team”. One such team that has been released includes Daredevil, Elektra, and Iron Fist.
Watching the gameplay brought back a lot of good memories, a beautiful menagerie of chaos and powers flying around; but the animation and graphics are just that much better. Team Ninja delivers the slight cell-shading look, which I love. The designers bring the action closer to the character, while previous iterations had more of an eagle-eye vantage point.
To no surprise, the heroes and villains revealed focus on the Marvel Cinematic Universe with some of the more popular X-Men sprinkled in (AS YOU CAN SEE IN THE NEW TRAILER ABOVE!). While no alternate costumes have been revealed, it looks like most of the designs will be ether up-to-date or movie versions. Characters announced so far: Ant-Man, Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Crystal, Daredevil, Deadpool, Doctor Strange, Drax, Elektra, Falcon, Gamora, Groot and Rocket, Hawkeye (in his Matt Fraction/David Aja duds), Hulk, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, Nightcrawler, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man (both Peter Parker and Miles Morales), Star-Lord, Storm, Thor, Venom, Vision, Wasp, and Wolverine.
With Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics’ bizarre “Avengers Project” looking no more than a horrible tease for comic book fans and hardcore gamers alike, MUA3, thankfully, looks like a superhero home run. Time to save up for the Switch! Excelsior.
-Robert Bexar