If a film or book introduced a new hero every five minutes it would be a chaotic, poorly paced, incoherent mess. And yet somehow this hyperactive drip-feed of familiar masked faces ends up being the most exciting element of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. This is a game designed for your thumbs, not your brain.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Block Order
As with its predecessors, you take control of a squad of four heroes, switching between them at will, using their varied super powers by mashing said thumbs. These abilities can interact with each other, too, exponentially increasing their power (and the amount of confusing colours on-screen).
Unfortunately, this system is explained poorly and the UI makes timing windows easy to miss; a shame, because without these synergy attacks there's little strategy. Just mash, mash, mash and the galaxy is saved.
The justification for all the super-heroics is Thanos doing his Infinity Stones shtick again. The story feels less like a plot and more a collection of trading cards being slammed onto a table one after the other.
It exists to show you familiar places, from Hell's Kitchen to The Raft to Wakanda, which in turn exist to stage biffo with familiar heroes, from Ghost Rider to Doctor Strange to Captain Marvel.
This steady stream of new sights is just enough of a hook to tolerate the mundane level design, simplistic combat, and a camera system that ends up being more of a threat than Thanos himself. Just as proceedings start to get repetitive, Black Panther or Wolverine leap out of nowhere. If you enjoy saying "I recognise that!", then this is your game.
Given that, it's a miscalculation that characters level-up individually only while in use. By the end I had no choice but to stick with the same four heroes. As much as I wanted to give my benched level-12 Spider-Man a swing, my level-40 Thor was the only viable choice. This strange design choice ends up working against the game's best feature: the sprawling, iconic roster.
More middling than marvel, but in the right mood, and in small doses, Ultimate Alliance 3 satisfied the base part of me that just wanted to see Thanos get punched in a video game. At the very least it's better than Age of Ultron.
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