Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order (Switch)

Around the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe was picking up steam, video games based on blockbuster films were falling out of vogue. While early films like Iron Man received adaptations, by the time the movies had reached the culmination of the Infinity Saga and the confrontation with the mad titan Thanos, at best you could hope to see elements from the films tacked onto the latest character collecting mobile game. It felt like a shame that one of the defining pieces of 2010s culture would never appear in video game form, but an unexpected compromise came when the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series would be revived after 10 years with a story focused on the Infinity Stones. While Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order does not attempt to directly adapt the films, it actually finds a splendid compromise, selecting many of its featured characters and locations because of their prominence in Marvel movies and shows but the versions featured in this action role-playing game hew more closely to their comic book counterparts.

 

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order has an enormous playable cast and plenty of ground to cover, but the story begins first with the Guardians of the Galaxy, a group of devil-may-care alien mercenaries, as they find an idling spaceship and decide to search it. Aboard the vessel the group runs into old enemies like the Kree empire and the cyborg Nebula, but more importantly they find the Infinity Stones are being kept on board, anyone who utilizes them able to reshape all of reality as they deem fit. The Black Order attack to try and claim the stones for their master Thanos, but the Guardians act quickly, snagging the stone that controls Space and teleporting themselves and the stones off towards Earth. While they manage to hold onto the one stone, the other five have been scattered across the globe and supervillains are quick to seek them out or utilize them for their own aims, the Guardians soon sought out by the Avengers and many other superheroes to help put a stop to the chaotic ambitions of many different evil organizations.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order crafts its plot more to glue together excuses to take you to many major Marvel locations and recruit a wide range of heroes to your side. The search for the stones is almost episodic and Thanos and The Black Order mostly wait until the end of the plot to make significant moves, although the few times you do run into The Black Order before then at least work well in building them up as a powerful threat as your heroes often must flee or find themselves struggling to really hurt them. The game is much more a tour of the Marvel universe than anything else, but it is definitely one that will please most any fan due to the wide breadth in who is selected to appear and how they behave. For most characters like Captain America and Thor, they are presented with a pure earnestness befitting their comic counterparts, but a more modern character like Ms. Marvel also matches the writing of her comic series since she is more casual and comedic. The Guardians of the Galaxy, best known for their movies, lean more into the sarcastic portrayals found there and will undercut their genuine moments with humor, and Deadpool straddles a good line of being ridiculous while keeping his references to the game world being fictional just rooted enough that it doesn’t steal the show or undermine the other characters. The writing isn’t afraid to have a supporting character like Beast talk in frequent alliteration in a fun way that doesn’t come off as silly and Spider-Man cracks his jokes with confidence rather than following the unusual video game trend of doubting the quality of his own humor. You will be seeing characters like Bullseye wearing their sillier comic book costumes over their more grounded cinematic or modern appearances, but overall it feels like a celebration of who these characters are rather than some attempt to rebuke the stranger elements found in the history of these heroes.

 

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order presents a whopping 38 playable characters in the base game before you start including DLC expansions, and while the story sees you gradually unlocking them, you still get thrown nearly half of them fairly early on and for good reason. You’ll be fighting your battles with a team of four you can swap between as you please and the game even allows up to four player cooperative play. The playable characters from Marvel are well selected, expected major names, a few obscurities, but few obvious omissions beyond those who’d later appear in DLC like the Fantastic Four meaning the player will have a wide range of abilities and personalities to pick from. Marvel mainstays like Wolverine, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Hulk are given to you early, but you also get to have Crystal from the Inhumans, a lesser known character but her elemental powers make her a great long range attacker before others like Doctor Strange join the party later. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order pulls in characters popular due to things like the Spider-Verse movies, both Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen joining the team and even fighting differently enough from each other, there being some overlap between characters in terms of roles but no two truly attack alike. You’ll have punchy characters like Luke Cage, long range melee fighters like Ghost Rider who whips his chain around, and projectile attackers like Wasp, so crafting a flexible team isn’t difficult and even if you wanted a thematic team like a group of X-Men, their internal variation ensures you have a broad range of options in battle.

 

Making thematic teams can be beneficial too thanks to the game’s synergy attacks. All characters have some quick and easy attacks for combat as well as strong heavy hits and an aerial strike, but to do significant damage or activate helpful effects, each character also gradually unlocks four abilities that can be used fairly frequently despite costing energy to execute. Not every single ability is technically unique, many of your heroes have an attack that slashes rapidly as long as you hammer the button or one where they constantly fire a beam or bullets with the same button mashing input, but the other abilities in their repertoire will still help make them stand out and having some reliable standards at least means you don’t feel like you’re forced to pick an efficient fighter over a fun one. A character like Scarlet Witch can make a healing field and Storm can unleash ice across the ground that will freeze foes in place that stand on it, but beyond the range of powerful attacks, strength boosts, and movement tricks, abilities can also synergize with each other. Two heroes who have attacks of the same type can execute them one after the other to trigger a powerful combo attack, and with the right team, you can unleash constant synergy attacks to further increase your fighting ability. Picking characters with shared histories will boost your group abilities a touch, but finding out who synergizes and timing attacks well can make you far more potent in battle, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a game that can get quite difficult at points and demand smart team management to succeed.

Beyond the synergies though, you also have a few customization choices to improve individual characters and the broader alliance. Characters are leveled up only when they participate, and while treasures are often items that can bring certain characters up to speed, some will inevitably get left behind. New characters who join the team are usually at the right power level to be competitive though, and as you fight more with your heroes, you’ll be able to upgrade their abilities to be stronger or have new features. The team overall also benefits from Alliance Enhancement, a large web of hexagons containing boosts you unlock by spending the money and ability points earned through battle and exploration. Your path through the web must be built gradually, new purchases necessitating connections with old ones to be eligible, so figuring out how to spread out your resources to be capable but unlock helpful boons also helps you to gradually build your team up into more capable fighters. The last major consideration comes in the form of ISO-8 crystals, characters able to equip these for more passive benefits and over time you can even start upgrading the crystals to make your heroes even more potent. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order essentially allows you to commit to one team for the full adventure and cultivate them if you so choose, but it also has systems in place where you can keep swapping in new unlocks, although a means to more quickly get the stragglers you never played with up to speed would have allowed the cast to be even more flexible in who you utilize or experiment with.

 

Naturally, all these systems need to be turned against something, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order has a villain cast almost as varied as its heroes. There are plenty of supervillains to take on with their own unique boss fights, and with the Infinity Stones in place, they can sometimes take on more advanced forms. The Green Goblin isn’t just going to hurl explosives at you, he’ll stop time and fly about on his glider to avoid your attempts to toss them back. The Kingpin is normally just a crime boss, but give him some of the ISO-8 and he’s firing lasers and tearing pillars down to be a powerful brute instead. You have plenty of faithfully adapted foes as well, Sandman can be a tough to pin titan of moving sand and Ultron will rely on plenty of his robot duplicates to back him up, but most importantly the fights are able to feel unique, give fair warning about incoming attacks, and yet still push you to be excellent at dodging and setting up your attacks to succeed. Limited revives can actually find themselves depleted, although retrying is generous at least and there are Infinity rifts where you can do optional battle challenges to grow your heroes and earn goodies you can then carry over for another attempt. The Infinity rifts can wear down the novelty of some characters through repetition, but it can also throw together bosses or add new conditions to make for entertaining battle concepts or fights far tougher than what the story offers. Even normal enemies can be tough, but that’s because sometimes normal enemies are towering robot Sentinels or mutated inmates who can put up a good fight on their own. AIM snipers in Wakanda can instantly kill a hero if you don’t deal with them, and many of the tougher foes found in groups of standard baddies have stun meters you need to deplete for them to start taking considerable damage, a feature also found in boss battles that will give you a chance to use things like your Extreme Attacks which act as a useful bit of burst damage.

 

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order can afford to let you recharge powers so often because it doesn’t give up ground too easily, but the balance is at a sweet spot where you are working to make progress but not clawing through by the skin of your teeth. Co-op can definitely split the burden, but there are some little issues with the game’s approach to multiplayer. The main one is that, while single-player can effectively pull off a behind-the-back angle, having multiple heroes under human control means the camera is better off looking down on the action and making out certain details becomes harder. Heroes can sometimes look like villains due to similarly colored costumes, the outlines applied to indicate players aren’t stark enough to prevent mix-ups, and a lot of special abilities can flood the screen with visual effects that can further lead to losing track of yourself. Even when you manually start moving the camera it can snap in disorienting ways, the automatic adjustments not always following you the best either. The dodge is thankfully pretty effective in keeping you safe until you orient yourself though, and the only other issues to be found are rare glitches like how Wasp’s wing noises will sometimes cause a character’s voice lines to cut off. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order does slip in some brief bits of variety so it isn’t constant conflict too, moments where you group needs to get around area hazards not only giving you a new danger, but they help tie to the setting often as well. It’s one thing to visit the Dark Dimension, but having the ethereal plane warp your perspective and require traveling through portals to get around helps it stand out from a ninja palace with its booby traps.

THE VERDICT: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is definitely a crowd pleaser when it comes to its wide roster of characters and villains and yet it won’t give up ground easily, the combat asking you to effectively grow your group of heroes and utilize their powers well. While mostly a tour of recognizable parts of the Marvel universe, the basic plot still brings in beloved characters and presents them faithfully, each one playing differently enough and bringing something new to your team of four. Things can get hectic especially in multiplayer, but you’ll need to find the order in the chaos to succeed so this truly feels like an action role-playing game rather than a comic book character buffet.

 

And so, I give Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. The plot of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order has a feeling akin to a group of kids trying to make something comprehensible out of the specific superhero action figures they have on hand, the story needing little justification to throw you over at the X-Mansion or Avengers Tower beyond a broad villainous group and the enemies always accommodating in attacking in time to give you some action. It is a bit strange the Black Order aren’t as present as the title implies, but at the same time they are far less compelling characters than the plethora of villains from the history of Marvel Comics and leaning more towards concocting reasons to introduce familiar faces definitely makes for more exciting boss fights and enjoyable cameos. A really smart balance was made in pleasing most anyone who loves these characters and the game systems are mostly balanced that you can fight with the ones you like but benefit from finding out how they work together. Despite there being plenty of systems at play to enhance the team, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order doesn’t need to slow down much for you to enhance your alliance as it can be done quickly and at intervals that prevent constant interruption for improvement. While the more dynamic behind-the-player view likely endears this game greatly to solo players, designing more strongly around a top-down view could have helped assuage much of the camera problems or how easy it is to get lost in the visual noise when playing with others. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order never gets overcomplicated because in the midst of battle you’re still likely using a basic combo with abilities peppered in. This action RPG allows you to use your special moves rather liberally so you’re not just slogging through until you can unleash your hero’s more interesting attacks, and the difficulty kicking in at parts also encourages you to be smart about it.

 

While not really an adaptation of the MCU’s Infinity Saga, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order instead feels like an attempt to unite all the corners of Marvel that people love since the start of the 21st Century. It’s pulling from films, comics, and shows from under different company banners and with different levels of current relevance, and while some of those characters were shunted to DLC, they still feel just as realized as the rest of the cast if you do get your hands on them. There may not be much to the written material and so many characters sharing the spotlight means digging deep into any one would have felt odd, but the game still remains enjoyable as a superhero action RPG where you can jump in as a bunch of beloved characters and fight some uncomplicated but still engaging battles against classic straightforward supervillains.