2006 was a pretty pivotal year for me. I was delving deeper into watching anime, I was going to be graduating from my elementary school and moving on to middle school and in that same year, Marvel Ultimate Alliance came out.

In my opinion, Marvel Ultimate Alliance sits near the pinnacle of Marvel based video games and still does today. I remember spending hours playing it with my brothers battling iconic Marvel villains and working together with a huge cast of heroes. I'm sure you can only imagine how excited we were when the news dropped that Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2 would be remastered and soon be available on next generation consoles. A chance to delve back into our younger years where Marvel games weren't a rare unicorn sighting didn't go missed.

First off, this game can't even be called a remaster. One thing the game hasn't even received is any major changes to the user interface or a graphical upscale. The graphical change is only very slightly noticeable. Textures look a little less muddy and character models look a little less shoddy over the 10 year gap between original release and now. The game hasn't aged very well but it is still fun to play as usual. I had been craving a beat em up like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage. Gameplay centers around assembling a team of your 4 favorite heroes and going out and completing quests to earn experience points and gear to equip and level up and unlock new special powers to use in combat. My personal favorite always included Moon Knight on any team I had. You can also unlock other heroes like Black Panther, Blade and Daredevil by finding their secret figurines or coming across them during missions. The game has a playable cast of 25 heroes to choose from, ranging from Captain America to Ms. Marvel. The original release had slightly different characters across its multi-platform release and 8 DLC characters. This remastered release has none of those DLC characters included at all and for no reason at all. Its an even more egregious sin that the games are included in a $60 bundle with no DLC attached. That sorely disappointed me in enjoying the game but the problems don't stop there.

This port also contains a lot of bugs and glitches that were never before encountered in our playtime and the computer AI hasn't been improved upon at all. My brothers and I are going through the Valley of Spirits, the Mandarin's lair. We come across a puzzle that requires us to push blocks and I begin solving it. As I'm pushing the final block to rest on a pressure plate, my little brother jumps on top of the block and then out of nowhere the block simply vanishes from the game world. If it hadn't been that we could just stand on the plates ourselves and pull the hidden lever, we might have been stuck there until reloading our save. Another example is that while we're doing another push block puzzle in Asgard, Luke Cage decides that the best way to get out my way was to literally run off the edge and fall to his doom. A similar thing happened when Silver Surfer chose to commit suicide as well in Mephisto's Hell dimension just of his own free will while fighting enemies. In short, game physics alter themselves at will, falling through the level can happen, sometimes double jumping will trap you in the air. There's a lot to list. This is just the console version, I've heard that the PC version is virtually unplayable.

All in all, I ultimately had fun playing the game again. My brothers and I merely laughed off all the unfortunate events and we just powered through. It doesn't detract from the fact that this was a lazily handled port though. There will be a patch incoming that will fix these issues. I say that you should get this game but wait until after the patch and wait for a price drop on the game.