Last updated: 09/04/2006 by Jonathan Metts

Role-playing games typically don't emerge on a new system until many months after launch, but Marvel: Ultimate Alliance will be there on day one for Wii. This game is a Marvel-wide successor to the popular X-Men Legends games from Activision and developer Raven Software. The general idea is to assemble a team of four Marvel superheroes and fight the evil plans of Dr. Doom and his fellow super villains.

No longer shackled to the X-Men characters, Ultimate Alliance lets you play as Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Namor, Blade, Ghost Rider, and many more. Of course, some X-Men are still in the roster, including Wolverine, Iceman, and Nightcrawler. When you add in all the bad guys and supporting characters, the game features over 140 unique Marvel characters, which has to be some kind of record. Even the continent-sized Galactus makes an appearance.

Choosing your team can be a complex process in Ultimate Alliance. Of course you'll want to have a balanced group, taking into consideration the experience levels and customized abilities of each character. You can also create a name,, logo, and vehicle for the group. Putting certain characters together will open up special combos and team bonuses, so you may want to combine members of the Fantastic Four or Avengers. A new feature allows you to level up the entire team at once to make sure no one is underdeveloped, but you can also choose to customize characters individually as in the X-Men Legends games.

Any action-RPG like this one is going to involve tons of combat, so Ultimate Alliance packs in more moves than its predecessors. In addition to punch/kick combos and the obligatory super powers, the heroes can now grapple and block. Leave your button-mashing ways behind! Flying is also now a full combat mode, not just a method of transporting across gaps, so you can have all-out aerial battles (think Dragon Ball Z or The Matrix: Revolutions). Environments are highly destructible, so you can blast through walls and pick up all sorts of blunt and sharp objects to use as weapons.

For the Wii version, adapted by Vicarious Visions, button-tapping combos for special moves are replaced with simple gesture controls. You can assign moves for up to five gestures on the Wii remote: swing up, down, left, right, and push towards the screen. An optional screen guide helps you remember which moves are mapped to which motions – should be handy since you'll be switching characters often, and each one has a different set of moves. Basic punches and blocks are still activated with button presses, and the nunchuk's joystick controls character movement.

With four heroes per team, Ultimate Alliance is a perfect fit for cooperative four-player action. Having friends in control of other characters also makes it easier to set up powerful combo moves, which provide additional experience points. Unfortunately, Nintendo's online gameplay network for Wii is not going to be ready for launch (at least not for third-parties), so this version has offline multiplayer only.