S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Review

Overview: The best S.T.A.L.K.E.R game to date - Stable, compelling and atmospheric like you wouldn’t believe!

The Good Stuff:

Very well done ambiance, new enemies, very very stable

The Bad Stuff:

Slow plot, exploration is more fun than the actual storyline

The Druid’s View:

In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series’ third installment, you play as Ukrainian security agent Alexander Degtyarev. A number of military helicopters have crashed in the region devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster–known as The Zone–and you’re sent to investigate. Call of Pripyat tries a bit harder than its predecessors in the storytelling department; the camera pans around your character in cutscenes, the writing is more straightforward, and the climax ties back to Shadow of Chernobyl, the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. The plot gets a bit interesting in the final few hours as you find out more about what’s going on in Pripyat, the abandoned city closest to the nuclear plant. Unfortunately, there’s little to get you invested before that, and the awkward scripted scenes don’t communicate a sense of drama as much as they highlight the aging visuals. A few characters, such as an alcoholic technician who will upgrade your weapons only after you give him enough vodka, are interesting or entertaining enough to make you care about their fates. But for the most part, you’ll care only about surviving–and thriving–in such bleak, lawless environment.

And what stunning environments they are! Shacks dot the grassy landscapes, cracks open in the earth’s crust, and the famed Pripyat Ferris wheel looms beyond a barbed-wire fence. Storms rage across the skies, and frightening radioactive emissions spread across The Zone, threatening the small pockets of human life that populate it. You encounter groups of bandits fending off mutant attacks or huddled around a fire, camped near a radioactive anomaly. This is a tense, unpredictable, and sometimes scary place where the next step could invite danger or bring respite. You get some forewarning of some attacks, such as the frenzied barking of mutated dogs before a pack of them descend upon you. But other times, the darkness hides a shocking surprise, like a new enemy to the series called the burer. These misshapen dwarves are like mutant poltergeists, flinging objects at you and even telekinetically yanking your weapon out of your hands. A sinister encounter with one of these creatures in the center of Pripyat near the end of the game is one of several nail-biting highlights.

Another highlight is a nighttime ambush of another newly introduced beast called the chimera. Night is wholly black in Call of Pripyat, not the dim facsimile that so many other games provide. Not knowing when this terrible beast might bear down upon you in this blackness makes this just one of many petrifying sequences, though even most mundane encounters will have you sweating bullets. Call of Pripyat is not an easy game, so you need to aim well, know your weapons’ strengths and weaknesses, and conserve ammo. Human opponents put up a tough fight, so running in guns blazing is a quick ticket to the afterlife. There are times when the AI’s ultraproficiency seems a little too obvious. Human enemies facing away from you have the uncanny ability to notice when you peek out a window behind them and are remarkably good shots in the dead of night, even without night vision scopes equipped. But despite a bit of cheating, Call of Pripyat rarely feels unfair. It features none of Clear Sky’s lame choke points and mission design issues, and the economy and weapon upgrade systems have been tweaked in sensible ways. So while you’ll still make use of the quicksave and quickload keys, you never feel like the game devolves into frustrating save-game attrition.

These aren’t the only improvements Call of Pripyat makes over its precursors. This is by far the most stable S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game out of the box; we not a single crash or corrupted save file, and the graphics engine performs better than ever (if not quite perfectly), even when you turn on the new DirectX 11-specific options. This update doesn’t thrust the game into the forefront of cutting-edge visuals, but while low-resolution textures and clumsy animations may betray the engine’s age, carefully crafted environments and all sorts of atmospheric touches make this a case in which art trumps technology. Other welcome improvements include flexible hotkeys,along with important gameplay additions, from preventative medications to the ability to roam The Zone freely once you’ve finished the story.

Outside of the main story, there are plenty of side quests to pursue. You’ll eliminate bloodsucker nests, search for a fabled corner of paradise, and, as before, hunt for incredibly valuable artifacts hidden in the midst of various anomalies. Gathering artifacts is as tense and exciting as it ever was, requiring you to venture into a deadly anomaly that may pick you up into the air and throw you around, burn your skin to a crisp, or zap you with jolts of electricity. All the while, you must follow your detector’s signal to pinpoint the artifact’s location. The search is frantic, and the risk is high, which makes success oh-so-sweet. All these tasks are wrapped into a free-form package, allowing you to explore The Zone under your own terms. In fact, the vague instructions you receive from some mission providers require you to thoroughly explore every nook and cranny, from abandoned schoolhouses to derelict fuel stations. Don’t expect a specific mission waypoint with every job you undertake. This is frustrating if you let it be, but it’s an authentic part of Call of Pripyat’s bleakness. The Zone does not allow you to tame it without a struggle.

The game isn’t always so open ended, and some story missions funnel you through a few extended, linear sequences, though Call of Pripyat falters slightly here. The game spends a lot of time setting up Pripyat as home to unspeakable dangers, and a protracted journey through a long, dark series of tunnels is so nerve-racking that the reward for the effort–the city of Pripyat–is a bit of a letdown. There are fewer opportunities for boundless exploration here, fewer surprises to discover–and no typical vendors, which might lead to some unavoidable travel back to the game’s two other major regions. Thankfully, this is when the story missions start to get more interesting, moving from mundane to there’s-something-freaky-going-on-here territory.

Call of Pripyat’s multiplayer options, just like those of its predecessors, are routine and slightly clumsy, because the game’s shooting mechanics don’t work so beautifully when isolated from the context that makes them successful. But it’s the chilly ambience and lifelike ecology that should lure you to the newest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, not the ordinary online play. Well-constructed environments and superb sound design make The Zone as cheerless and ominous as ever. But it’s also rich with resources, begging you to cultivate its secrets and withstand the hostilities. Series fans and newcomers alike should don their protective gear and journey forth.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Ultimate Sith Edition Review - PC

Summary:
You’re obviously a PC gamer who’s reading this and you also realize how painful the wait has been since Star Wars: The Force Unleashed released last  year for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Now it makes its presence felt on the PC will all the DLCs - the Jedi Academy, Tatooine and Hoth levels. But now that’s it here, does it measure up?
Good:

• Amazing story line, the best of any Star Wars stories so far
• Awesome level design
• Super cool moves, you can actually FEEL the force
• Nice costumes, skins, saber options

Bad

• Frustrating targeting
• Loads of glitches
• Some game sequences are really ridiculous.

Ugly

• WTF system requirements!
• Poor game engine

The Story:
You play StarKiller, Darth Vader’s very handpicked secret apprentice.  In the years between Episodes III and IV, Darth Vader trains your and puts you to work. You mission:  mopping up the few remaining Jedi.

Graphics:
The graphics are nothing short of mind blowing. From the opening sequence where you play as Darth Vader and face off against the wookies to the stunning levels of Hoth, it’s a Star Wars visual treat! If you played it on the Xbox 360 or PS3, you’ll know just how awesome it was! However, since it’s in for the PC, you’d expect some sort of change, better graphics, better physics etc. but nope, you receive pretty much what you saw on the console…and trust me, it’s a bad port. We tested it on our lowly dual core machine with a 4850 and it ran like sucked nuts. Make sure you have a Core2Quad at least with a 9800gt+ card or better.

Controls:
The controls are… well, annoying at times. The Keyboard mouse combo is easier than playing with the game pad, but the overall experience wasn’t great. Blame it on poor camera angles and frustrating targeting mechanisms.

Gameplay:
I’m inclined to say such great things here, but I can’t. To be very honest, it does some things very well and bombs on a few others. For those of you who’ve played Star Wars: Jedi Academy, you’d think this was the same game on steroids, but it’s just a scaled down version of its game play. The biggest surprise and let down,  is that there are only four main force powers: Push, Grip, Repulse and Lightning - they’re upgradable though and can be used in devastating combination. But really…just 4 is a let down.

But whatever little they give you, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed doles out your powers at a leisurely pace over nine missions, from the gorgeous fungal terrain of Felucia to the vivid metallic graveyard of Raxus Prime, but the coolest are available right from the start. Using Force Grip and Force Push, you can pick up and throw or just knock around parts of the environment, from enemies who reach out in mid-air for a handhold to exploding barrels and scrap metal. Lobbing debris around is fun and deviously entertaining as  you send crowds of stormtroopers hurtling through glass and chuck exploding orbs into passing Tie Fighters, you can almost forgive the piss poor targeting system.
Then there is my favorite - Force Lightning and heaving your lightsaber around like a boomerang, but I found that Force Grip and Force Push made the most entertaining use of the clutter in the early missions. One fault I found with Grip and Push, however, was that larger objects like AT-ST laser turrets take a lot of force to lift. That makes sense logistically but standing still in the middle of a laser spray to mentally heft a huge piece of  debris leaves you like a sitting duck waiting ready to have its goose cooked!

In terms of the additional content, what you’re getting here is an extension of the base game, something that simply adds more content to the experience but doesn’t actually change (or even fix) anything. At very start you’ll notice that the three additional levels are standalone options, so you don’t need to play through the game in order to get to them.  The downside to this is that none of your powers or anything else carries over, nor does anything that you earn carry back into the main game. However, that largely doesn’t matter as you start almost fully powered-up for each of these levels anyway. What the DLCs are like, I’ll leave it to you to discover, but I’ll talk a little about the Hoth level, which again is the only exclusive bit to the Ultimate Sith Edition. Now it isn’t quite as exciting as either the Jedi Academy or Tatooine levels as the Hoth base is essentially just a series of square rooms and corridors connecting them. It looks great, mind you, and is pretty much dead-on with what you see in Empire, but it doesn’t really make for the most interesting level to fight through.

After slicing and dicing for a while, you’ll face off with Luke Skywalker. The battle with him is much tougher than the fight against either Boba Fett or Obi-Wan, but that’s because he can be pretty cheap. He has attacks that are very frustrating, and there can be guys out of the area that you’re in that constantly shoot at you. It’s not a terrible fight, but it’s not nearly as fun as I had hoped it could be…or it should have been.

Sound/Music/Score:
Its Star Wars god damn it!! What more do you need?? But yea, I had a lot of sound issues, it might be just me, it seems soft and almost lifeless.  I really needed to crank up the volume during the game and turn it down during the FMVs.

Overall:
Now whether you should pick up this game or not, I’ll leave it to you. But if you’ve never played this game, yes, pick it up. If you are not a Star Wars fan, you’ll still find it enjoyable, but might be a little frustrating. If you already own the game on one of the consoles, this is not worth picking up. Just download the DLCs and you’re not missing anything. Overall a good game with a flawed experience, but an awesome story line which will keep you engaged right through out. I would easily rate this one of the better Star Wars games…but not enough to make it the best.If you wondered why I’ve not reviewed this on other consoles. To be honest. Its the same. So you’re not reading anything entirely different that’s gonna happen on the Xbox 360 and the PS3

Release Info:
Available on:  Xbox 360, PS3, Mac and PC
Genre: Action
Release date: November 3rd 2009.
Published by: Aspyr
Developed by: LucasArts

System Requirements for PC
Our recommendation for the full experience:

• Core2Duo Extreme or Core2Quad
• 4870 or better
• 4gigs of ram
• Creative X-Fi series sound card

For the casual gamer:

• Core2Duo 2.8 GHz or better
• 4 gigs of ram
• 9600gt or better

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City Review – Xbox 360

Summary
If you’ve enjoyed GTA 4, then be sure to pick up this awesome pack which has 2 distinct stories (The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony), new cars, weapons and great value for money! The best part – you don’t need the GTA 4 disc to play the game.
Good:

• Two very good distinct story lines
• Lots of new vehicles and weapons
• Introduced checkpoints, making failure less frustration
• Good value for money

Bad

• Graphics  engine is  starting to show its age
• Control system is still frustrating

Ugly:

• Separate Multiplayer Lobbies for GTA 4 and GTA 4 Episodes.

The Story
The Lost and the Dammed:

Johnny is a veteran member of The Lost, a notorious biker gang. Johnny has been creating business opportunities for The Lost in Liberty City, but his first loyalty must be to the patch he wears on his back and to Billy Grey, the club’s President. However, when Billy returns from rehab hell-bent on bloodshed and debauchery, Johnny finds himself in the middle of a vicious turf war with rival gangs for control of a city torn apart by violence and corruption. Can the brotherhood survive?

The Ballad of Gay Tony:

You take on the role of Luis Lopez who works for the title character. Where GTA IV star Niko Belic and Lost and Damned anti-hero Johnny Klebitz are men of little means attempting to rise up in the world, Luis has already made his transition from rags to riches. Tony Prince, owner of the biggest straight and gay nightclubs in Liberty City, took Luis under his wing and made him something. The Ballad of Gay Tony isn’t about living in squalor. You live well and you work for the richest men in the city.
Graphics
For both these games, graphics are nothing new. The old GTA 4 engine is starting to show its age, and things could have been improved to make it standout, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are claims that it does look better, but quite frankly the changes have been very minute compared to the severe issues that could have been addressed. But don’t get me wrong…it’s still a great looking game despite the old graphics engine and will put most modern games to shame.

Controls
The controls are very much the same as GTA 4, nothing new to add here. Some annoying camera angles still exist, but this can be attributed to not tweaking the graphics engine as well

Gameplay
This is where it truly shines…

The Lost and the Dammed:
While TLaD’s story offers up a look at the grungiest aspects of Liberty City’s already-seedy underworld, it also brings a raft of new gameplay features and improvements, not the least of which is the ability to stay on your bike if you suffer a minor collision. Throw in sidekicks who level up the more they’re used, a few new weapons and new, biker-centric multiplayer modes, and The Lost and Damned is a fun – if unrelentingly gloomy – romp through GTA’s even-rougher side.
Another neat feature introduced in TLaD, which also made it into The Ballad of Gay Tony, is a mission checkpoint system. Some of the missions take a long time to beat, and a good number of them involve riding or driving to locations that might be a good distance away before the action really gets under way. In GTAIV it could be frustrating to fail these missions, because doing so meant restarting them from the beginning, but the checkpoint system addresses that problem by giving you the option to restart from the last checkpoint that you made it through successfully.
Parachutes are perhaps the most obvious new feature introduced in The Ballad of Gay Tony, and while there aren’t many missions that use them, those that do are definitely some of the episode’s best. You can use parachutes outside of story missions as well, and the controls while falling are easy enough to grasp that you’ll be hitting the centers of targets, gliding through rings in the air, and landing on moving vehicles in base-jump challenges in no time. Other activities that you’re introduced to during Lopez’s never-a-dull-moment story include dancing and drinking minigames, hitting golf balls at a driving range, and competing in and betting on cage-fighting tournaments. You’re not likely to spend a whole lot of time with any of these optional activities, but they’re fun to check out once or twice, and they compare favorably to the arm wrestling, air hockey, and hi-lo-card games introduced in this offering.

The Ballad of Gay Tony:
The Ballad of Gay Tony is packed with weapons that give a big bang. Helicopters play a larger role, which is both good and bad. It’s certainly faster and easier to travel in a chopper and the new ones are stocked with weapons, but mid-air battles are still a challenge. There are a few missions that require you to do battle in the air and all are a challenge simply because it’s difficult to target enemies. The high-flying elements are a welcome part of the Gay Tony storyline, but they should have been refined. Fortunately, the majority of missions don’t focus on mid-air confrontations.
Luis has plenty of weapons to fulfill his missions, including the P90 assault SMG…and you get to romp around in a compact APC NOOSE tank. It’s built for policing metropolitan areas
Along with a bigger, badder, bolder attitude, The Ballad of Gay Tony includes some welcome additions. You receive a score at the end of every mission. Once you beat the game, you can replay any mission using your phone and attempt a higher score. There are also 15 base jumping challenges for those who missed doing silly stuff in a GTA game.

On top of this are 25 Drug Wars side quests. Your buddies from the old days, when you were a petty thug, need your help. They want to build a drug cartel but have no money. They plan to start their empire by stealing drugs from rival gangs. Each Drug Wars scenario gets progressively more difficult and hectic. It’s mindless fun — just the kind of fun I like. If fisticuffs is more your thing, you can join the fight club and take on other shirtless brawlers. It’s not as explosive as Drug Wars, but it’s another way to eat up some time.
The Lost and Damned has seven  and in addition to the requisite Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Race options, there are some really inventive ones. They include Chopper vs. Chopper, in which a player on a bike has to race through checkpoints while a player in a helicopter gunship tries to stop him, and Witness Protection, which casts one player as a bus driver that a team of police must protect from a team of bikers. Club Business is a lot of fun as well, since it lets you and up to seven other players play as a biker gang and complete missions cooperatively.
The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the other hand, has only four multiplayer modes, and they’re all enhanced versions of modes from GTAIV. The Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes benefit from the inclusion of new weapons like sticky bombs, an advanced sniper rifle, and an automatic shotgun with explosive rounds. Meanwhile, Race and GTA Race modes feature new street courses and now give every driver access to a nitrous tank that gradually refills after every boost. This multiplayer content can be a lot of fun if you get in with a good group of people. However, it can be tough to find people playing some of the modes, and it’s unfortunate that to move from one episode’s modes to the other’s you have to go back out to the main menu, load up the other episode, and access the multiplayer options from the in-game cell phone again. A single multiplayer lobby that combines content from GTAIV and both episodes would be much more convenient.

Sound/Music:
The sound is still great as ever and has definitely gone up a notch or two.  While we can continue to write endlessly on the new music added…take a look at the official site for the tracks.

Overall:
We would recommend you play TLaD before the Ballad of Gay Tony. Most people say that TLaD has a character that one couldn’t care about…but we disagree, as you get deeper into the game you’ll see how cool Johnny can really be and how he comes into his own as story unfurls. But yes, compared to GTA 4, it’s a better offering, as none of the bad stuff from GTA 4 made it into this.
The Ballad of Gay Tony is the perfect way to close out the GTA IV saga. Finally, we know what happened to the diamonds stolen in the main story a year-and-a-half ago. Though Luis Lopez doesn’t have much of a story at all (this is the ballad of his boss, after all), the supporting cast is phenomenal. There are a lot of hilarious moments and ludicrous missions that will please GTA fans. Sure, a few of the missions fall flat compared to the wild nature of others, but all-in-all this is  a great package

Release Info:
Available on:  Xbox 360
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Oct 29, 2009
Published by: Rockstar Games
Developed by: Rockstar North
Franchise: Grand Theft Auto
Multiplayer: Online 16 Player VS, Offline – 1 player solo.

Torchlight Review

Torchlight is an awesome dungeon based RPG with a fun, familiar and enjoyable combat system. Plus the plethora of items that you receive in the game are just magnificent!!

What’s hot:

• Very well done action-RPG formula
• Engaging and atmospheric dungeons
• Great bunch of monsters to bash up
• Great Soundtrack and musical score
• Rewarding loot drops

What’s Warm:

• No multiplayer
• Does nothing new

What’s Cold:

• Nothing!

The first thing you’ll notice about this game is how close it is to Diablo 1 and 2. Infact most of the keys are still mapped from Diablo 1 and 2. And after a few hours of playing…you’ll realize that you don’t need to wait for Diablo III! (but we still are)… Fans of action-oriented role-playing can get a first-rate fix of hacking and slashing right now in Torchlight, a great dungeon crawl from the designers of the first two Diablo games and the cult hit Fate. Runic Games has forged a letter-perfect copy of the action role-playing formula with fast-paced combat and cartoonish graphics that will keep you clicking away!!

Also once it begins you’ll realize  how light, fast and undemanding this game is on your system. It even has a netbook mode!!  Although we’ve never tried it…it seems like it will run on low powered systems just fine. If you have been  a fan of the Fate games, then  don’t expect any surprises. Torchlight is an evident  successor, boasting the same attitude, art style, and lighthearted personality that make that series a breezier play than the gothic Diablo games.  The story lets you chose between 3 classes, a dual-wielding Destroyer, the fast ranged action Vanquisher and  the Ember-channeling Alchemist, you’ll soon be clicking and bashing away at stuff.  The story starts off telling you about your quest in Torchlight, a mining town built alongside a mountain loaded with deposits of the magic-enabling Ember mineral. A formerly good-guy adventurer named Alric has gone over to the dark side due to the corrupting influence of tainted Ember, so you sign on to help his former companion track him into the many dungeons that cut through the underworld beneath the town. The fun part is the technological mixing - Battleaxes coexist with rifles, and a robot bard who sends you on assassination runs. The art is centered on a more cartoonish look. Heroes have square Disney jaws and great big eyes. Monsters are more outlandish than creepy, with comic-book proportions and exaggerated attack movements. But the plot and quests revolve around familiar dungeon expeditions to kill monsters, fetch various items, and score lots of loot. So even if the game looks and feels a bit different, it remains a stock-standard action role-playing game at heart.

Torchlight PC screen

But it’s a formula that is used very, very well. Torchlight hits all the highs of the action RPG genre and avoids virtually all of the lows. The only serious issue that some will have with the gameplay is the absence of a multiplayer mode. Being able to kill monsters with a pal or three is a core part of the Diablo experience, so some players will find this omission hard to live with. Still, the solo campaign is reasonably lengthy (and is boosted by some bonuses after its conclusion) and well designed. Levels move along smartly, so you get into a perfect clicking groove. On normal difficulty, only the biggest beasties take more than a few clicks to kill if you’re collecting loot and upgrading weapons regularly. This helps the game’s pace, because nothing slows down a hackfest RPG faster than monsters that take forever to kill. Killing causes creatures to explode in fountains of blood, too. Level corridors tend to look like slaughterhouses after you’ve passed by, adding a sick sense of satisfaction to your exploits. Many monsters have weird names, like varkolyn or shambler, and some look strange, perhaps most notably some of the pygmy variations. Bigger boss-type foes scattered throughout levels even come with ludicrous names, like Ghoulrider the Merciless and Foolfighter the Reviled. But they all still attack like traditional fantasy orcs, zombies, giant spiders, and the like.

Great graphics, spells, loots and more!

All of the randomly generated dungeons come in many themes and with dramatically different art. Bleak stony mines coexist with mossy labyrinths and roaring waterfalls. You’re unlikely to get bored with what you’re looking at. Quests never involve assignments that could be considered innovative, although they are mixed up enough in length and objective that you don’t feel like you’re constantly grinding. Some of the side quests, such as grabbing samples of the various types of Ember for a mage and collecting magical doodads for a cowardly researcher, serve as quick breaks from the more involved main story missions. Loot drops are extremely well handled. You get loads of generic stuff, but just the right amount of killer hardware and item sets to keep you picking everything up. And the whole adventure is further pulled together with one of the best soundtracks to ever grace an action RPG. Diablo composer Matt Uelman has put together haunting, hummable themes that flow along behind the ceaseless combat, keeping you engaged while not blowing up into an annoying clash of horns, which so often mars RPGs. The tunes range from Pink Floyd airiness to Renaissance fair string-plucking to a sparse, spooky piano.

Stunning combat environment

Well if you ask me, this is one of the best RPGs to hit the PC in many years…and for just $20…or Rs. 1000…you can’t go wrong with this!

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Review - Xbox 360

Coming right off 2006’s smash hit (mmm…’smash hit’ - wonder why no one uses that word anymore); Marvel Ultilmate Alliance 2 is a must have for any comic book fan! Even if you’re not :)…it’s packed with heroes and villains culled from the Marvel Universe, brims with button-tapping glee, and suffers from occasional and annoying technical idiosyncrasies. Its improvements to the formula can’t be ignored, however. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is easier to look at and features an intriguing character dialogue component. It also ties the heroic crew together with a much more intriguing story based on the Marvel Civil War miniseries, though comic fans should note that it takes more than a few liberties with that narrative. This isn’t a groundbreaking game, but it’s an enjoyable and replayable one.

From an isometric camera view, you lead a team of four Marvel stars through hordes of expendable henchmen and glowering robots, occasionally taking detours to solve simple puzzles and bash on the villains standing between you and fist-pumping victory. You lead one hero at a time, while the AI and/or other players, online or off, control the other three. Regardless of which heroes and antiheroes from the roster of about two dozen you choose to take along, they can all string two types of melee attacks into combos, grab various objects and enemies to throw around, and perform four superpowers limited only by a quick-recharging power meter. While each controls more or less the same, there’s a good amount of variety among the heroes. Storm can fly and knock down multiple foes at a time with a gust of wind; Venom’s tongue can lash about, doing damage to any nearby enemies; and Iceman can call forth an eruption of ice to impale villains from underneath. Whether you’re on your own or with buddies, the action is good, laid-back fun.

However, not all the characters are created equal. They’re all fairly balanced, but that doesn’t make them all correspondingly fun to play. The Invisible Woman’s debuffs can be helpful, but she’s not as viscerally appealing as Wolverine, with his dramatic clawing, or Deadpool, whose well-rounded powerset and self-referential one-liners make him consistently satisfying to use. However, ceaseless button mashing can make even the best characters tiresome, especially once you’ve discovered effective patterns that you can keep spamming again and again. Fortunately, you can change easily to another character not controlled by another player and switch unlocked heroes in and out of your active crew on the fly. If you’re on your own, you’ll be pleased to know that the AI often does a good enough job of taking care of the characters not in your control, using powers frequently and choosing enemies wisely. That isn’t always the case, though. Every so often, you’ll glimpse AI-driven heroes wandering about but contributing nothing to the chaos, and as in the first game, they might get stuck on objects or stutter about in an animation loop until they break free.

The most notable additions to the action are fusion powers. As you damage enemies, you fill up a fusion meter, and once it’s charged up, you can initiate a two-hero fusion attack. There are several types of attacks, depending on the two heroes involved in the fusion. Guided attacks, like the fire-and-ice beam created by Iceman and the Human Torch, let you maneuver the pair about the screen, zapping any foes unlucky enough to get caught in their elemental stream. Clearing attacks, appropriately, clear the immediate area of baddies, such as the laser deflection that Iron Man and Captain America perform. Different fusions come in handy at different times, but many of them are absolutely fantastic to watch, like any of those featuring Storm’s whirlwind. Various combinations of heroes don’t all make for singular fusions, however. Storm-plus-Gambit is essentially the same fusion as Storm-plus-Spiderman–one throws cards into the cyclone, while one spews webbing into it. The repetition among fusions is disappointing, especially if you tend to stick to the same one or two characters, but fusions are probably the best part of the game: most look fantastic and colorful, they do a lot of damage, and you don’t have to be stingy with them.

The story that gives context to all this action is based on two Marvel storylines: author Mark Millar’s Civil War comics event and Brian Michael Bendis’ Secret War. The narrative doesn’t closely follow those plot outlines, but Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2’s version is intriguing, and its tale of superheroes divided over the US government’s attempt to force heroes into legally registering has provocative political and social undertones. It also forces you into an eventual decision that doesn’t just divide your hero roster, but divides the entire game into two separate story experiences before bringing them back together again. It’s a clever method of storytelling that gives you a reason to replay the game again once you’ve finished the first time, just to see how it plays out if you make the other choice.

Your involvement with the story isn’t limited to making a single decision, however. Throughout the game, you’ll engage in dialogue with various characters and choose one of three different responses to their statements: aggressive, defensive, and diplomatic. Consistent responses lead to in-game rewards like team medals (more on these to come), though their contribution to the story is disappointingly negligible. The response options often don’t fit their category; sometimes, each choice seems equally smarmy (every option might seems like it should have been categorized as “passive-aggressive”). And because the dialogue is based on the situation and not necessarily tailored to the character you’re controlling, your choices may not seem completely appropriate. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking, “Come on–Venom would never say that!”

As you hack and slash your way through Latveria, the Negative Zone, and other locales, you’ll level up and earn team medals, so there are several ways to customize your roster. Customization is a bit more streamlined in the sequel than in the original. For example, you no longer find and equip gear as you did in the original, and you’re limited to equipping team-wide medals that may add cold damage to your melee attacks or increase the number of experience orbs you earn. It’s disappointing to see the role-playing elements of the original stripped down in such a way; after all, finding more loot is an addictive part of similar games, and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn’t seem to benefit in any way from this change. As before, you can let the game handle all the leveling for you and never worry about spending experience orbs and skill points if you don’t want to. Sadly, if you prefer to micromanage your heroes, you might get exasperated with a glitch that constantly resets the autoleveling option back to on, even after you turn it off. Other elements of the game have been smoothed out for the better. The menus are easier to navigate, and the addition of a navigation arrow means you’ll rarely lose your way. And in the most convenient and slick addition of all, should an online buddy wish to upgrade his hero, he can do so without pausing the game for everyone: the AI will simply take over for him until he returns.

The visuals have also been noticeably smoothed out. Environments are attractive and you’ll traverse a nicer variety of locations than in the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. There are still too many sterile interiors, but outdoor regions look terrific and colorful. Power effects are snazzy, filling the screen with bolts of electricity and bursts of fire. Character models also look better and, in most cases, seem true to their familiar comic book design. However, both the visuals and the sound design are still exasperatingly uneven. In the character select screen, the heroes look great; during conversations, they look stiff and occasionally bizarre, and the camera might give you a view of their internal geometry. The frame rate can’t always handle the excess of particles and explosions; it takes noticeable dips here and there, especially when you’re playing online. The inconsistency holds true for the voice acting as well, which is at times right on point (Deadpool was apparently a developer favorite; be sure to listen closely to the closing credits) and at other times laughably campy. The soundtrack and audio effects are rousing and boisterous, qualities perfectly consistent with the subject matter.

There’s a lot of game packed onto this disc. Not only will the campaign last you around 15 hours or so, but the branching story gives you a good reason to return. Furthermore, there are additional stand-alone missions to take on, most of which are designed well and are enjoyable to tackle; a trivia game that will test your Marvel comics knowledge; and lots of costumes, audio discs, and dossiers to collect. So while Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 may not take the series in a big and bold new direction, or benefit from the kind of refinement you would look for in a sequel, it does deliver the button-mashing, power-flinging, over-the-top action fans of the original would expect. And it’s just good fun.