Ports of Marvel Ultimate Alliance Met with Harsh Criticism Because of Its Horrible State
It was kind of surprising that Marvel suddenly decided to re-release the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games on current-gen consoles and, more interestingly, on PC. However, during its announcement at SDCC, Marvel did not promise to remaster the two games, the giant media company did not even guarantee any enhancement of any kind—both in content and in graphics department.
The previous titles which had the same treatment was Prototype and Deadpool. Both was published by Activision, and the re-release versions of both games did not receive any enhancement nor effort in recreating them. Both are just literal software dumps in every meaning of the word.
The Marvel Ultimate Alliance up-port is not even complete content-wise. All of the DLC characters are missing in both the PC and PlayStation 4 versions of the game. Granted, there is an exclusivity deal with Xbox 360 with some of the DLC so this might be the case. Xbox One versions of the game are not yet released; this might be holding off the DLC characters in gracing other platforms.
Unfortunately, the problem on PC is not even about the missing content, but the game performance itself. Like most of the games back a decade ago, the entire control scheme of Marvel Ultimate Alliance has controls that are bound to keys that the player can’t set up. The input lag using the keyboard set up also has issues with input lag. Navigation through menus, not just on a keyboard set up but also when using controllers, is also frustrating. This makes the simple task of saving the game or editing the players’ teams stressful.
Using an actual controller, as illustrated above, will not and does not help anyone. The game simply has control issues not predicated in the choice of hardware.
The production value of the game also is problematic. This game is a triple A production several years back, still, the sound is of low quality, badly mixed, and just gets interrupted every now and then. The cutscenes did not receive any “upres” treatment: they are blurry, murky, and in some areas pixelated. This is a result of just pure dumping of the software without even consideration to the modern hardware.
Like its predecessors, these titles will not likely have any support from Activision. Mods might help alleviate the problems the titles currently have but these should had been done by the team who got paid to port the titles; not the ones who paid for them.
