Avengers Assemble!

The past couple of months have been tough on my gaming career. Getting married and all of the extracurricular activities associated with it have taken a major chunk out of my free time. As we speak there are a pile of video games at home that I'm partially the way through and would love to finish if I could just find the time. I guess that's the major challenge of a 30 Year-old Gamer, finding the time to play. You have to prioritze your games and the one game out of all of them that I put ahead of the rest was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2.I picked up a copy of MUA2 (as I'll call it for short) back in September and although it's a relatively short game it took me to November to finish it. The game is set in the Marvel universe and consists of all of the major Marvel characters that you are well familiar with thanks to the movies, such as Wolverine, Iron Man, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, etc. If you read the comics (which I admittedly do regularly), then you will be familiar with the story line. The Marvel heroes have been messing up lately. In the process of defeating the bad guys, they've caused a lot of collateral damage. In one major incident a few hundred people died which caused the US Government to create the Superhero Registration Act. It forces all superheros to register with the government and give up their secret identities, if they don't they become outlaws. This causes a split right down the middle between heroes for the act and those against it. This causes a Civil War between the forces of Iron Man (Pro-act) and Captian America (Anti-act).

I love this story and the game does a great job following along with the story. You actually get to choose if you are going to side with Iron Man or Captain America, and your choices have a huge affect on the outcome of the game. Potential allies will become enemies and missions will change considerably. In this regard the game is a lot of fun.

MUA2 isn't without it's flaws however. If you've played the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance from a couple years ago you are going to have a major feeling of deja vu. It's basically the same game. If I was in another room and told a friend to put either game in my Xbox and go to a random stage, I would have a hard time figuring out which game I was playing. It seems like this could be a straight copy and paste from the prior version. Also, the game is repetitive. You are going to be doing the same thing over and over for 6-8 hours. It's a good thing what you are doing is a lot of fun, or the repetitiveness would be brutal.

Finally, every character from the Marvel universe is in this game. I read a Marvel comic every night and I've never even heard of half of these characters, nevermind know their backstory. At times it feels like you need a PHD in Marvel history to get all of the nuances of this game.

Despite all of that, the game is a lot of fun and it's family friendly. You can let your little 30yo Gamers out there play the game without any worries. It's about as violent as Lego Star Wars. You can team up with multiple people and cooperative destroy bad guys. It's a lot of fun.

Overall, I enjoyed playing MUA2 a lot and will probably play through it again making different choices. That is if I can find the time after the next 4 games I have to play.

Until next time,

- The 30 Year-old Gamer