Ultimate Alliance comes from a somewhat bygone era of licensed video games. Do you remember the mid-2000s where every developer was being forced to push out unengaging content with very little love put into it, shoved out to meet a movie tie-in deadline, inevitably making the whole effort feel kinda crap?

Ultimate Alliance however is one of the few games from that era that earns the title of “good licensed video game”. Hit and Run is another one. I guess you could also talk about some of the other Ultimate Alliance games, i.e. X-Men: Legends, but I feel personally this is the pinnacle of the series. Its sequel traded in a lot of the depth (and admittedly there’s not a huge huge amount in this one to begin with) for flashier moves, but also got rid of a lot of the extra collectible content and skins. The story is also far superior in the original.

This is, in my opinion, one of the essential Doctor Doom stories. I’m not a huge huge fan of the MCU (it has some movies I really like, but I’m indifferent to quite a lot of them) but I’d definitely be more interested if they managed to pull off a good Doom. Doom is engaging, charismatic, and just so damn full of himself you can’t help but be pleased when his evil scheme continues so you can continue chasing him across basically all the significant places in Marvel’s space-time continuum.

You go from fighting on a helicarrier to fending off Galactus to the depths of space, and these locations are peppered with great fanservice dialogues that reward loyal comics readers. I still don’t know what some of the references are, but it’s obvious the developers loved the source material and rewarded those who did the same. The four-person brawler allows you to mix-and-match heroes, who each have similar base attacks but some have the power to fly, swing, jump higher, pick up heavier objects, and all the heroes have their own unique powers that make them stand out from the rest. It’s likely you’ll have a different favourite set of heroes than mine by the end of the game – I like Spider-Woman, Blade, Wolverine and Deadpool.

It’s a co-op experience too, an experience that seems to be sorely missing from this era of video gaming. Where’s my old man stick so I can go yell at all the online gamers to buy a multitap and play Tekken on the couch with each other instead..?

Anyway, you should definitely play Ultimate Alliance if you’re at all a fan of the Marvel franchise. You can experience Marvel from a different era, an era where not everything was founded on the idea that it would somehow connect to or influence (or be influenced by) the MCU.

Enough of my rambling. I’m afraid you can’t buy Ultimate Alliance on any digital storefront currently, but you can always try your hand at buying a copy for PS2 somewhere. Or… well, there are other options. Ahem.