Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a 2019 action role-playing video game developed by Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja and published by Nintendo. It is the third installment in the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series, following 2006’s Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and 2009’s Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2. The game follows a new team of superheroes as they come together to save the universe from Thanos and the eponymous Black Order, who have launched a campaign to find the six Infinity Stones.

Campaign: The campaign will have players embarking on a journey to find the Infinity Stones and keep them safe from the forces of Thanos. And if I’m completely honest, the road to recovering the Infinity Stones is actually a fairly entertaining ride. At the time of this review, I still haven’t read the Infinity War comics but I did watch the Avengers: Infinity War film and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I do like that the story isn’t straight forward and that there’s a lot of twists. There are a lot of heroes and villains involved with their own agendas and it keeps the story from being stale. There’s a good focus on the characters and how they react to the situations. It makes the missions feel more personal. I do like that the characters get more shine and you get to see more of their personalities.

I can say despite how much I enjoyed the campaign and story I still don’t like how linear it feels. If the campaign was fashioned more with choices allowing this story to feel more like a war effort, similar to Dragon Age: Inquisition, then it would make the story feel more engaging and less linear. Like the first two games, the game would’ve benefited had it forced players to pick a certain team and had them play the entire level to the end with that team. This would’ve made the levels feel more like missions and made players be more strategic when it comes to the characters. In most of the missions, I leveled up Hulk and mostly swapped between him, Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Crystal, Cyclops, Captain America, Human Torch, and Phoenix. Loved the direction of the story and how well the characters are fleshed out. (4 out of 5)

Design: When it comes to overall look, this is the best of the three games. The cutscenes are well designed and polished, offering depth in terms of character interactions. I know with the MCU trending hard, that a lot of Marvel’s media is inspired by the films and tv. And with a lot of characters from the movie and tv in this game you can see where the designs were inspired from. I really enjoyed many of the character models and designs although a lot of people don’t. The level designs are good, they’re memorable, and when you’re in levels such as Stark Tower, Wakanda, or Dormammu’s realm, you feel like it.

One of the problems many players have had with the games is the fact that the camera goes haywire at times. I admit that there have been a few times where the camera zoomed in on a location rather than circling around to compensate.

The voice performances are actually pretty damn solid. I found that most of the cast work perfectly for the characters they voice. The music is good but necessarily memorable. The overall sound design is really good, both in-game and in cutscenes. In overall design, the game is actually pretty damn good. (4 out of 5)

Gameplay: The gameplay is mindless, repetitive fighting and I love it. It’s a beat-em-up and it definitely gets points for that. I do like that each character has to be leveled up, because the game gives players options while forcing them to commit. It’s easy in games like this for a player to pick ten out of the 30 characters for them to focus on. It’s like playing a fighting game. Most people only play with the characters they like. Gameplay is good, it’s fast paced, it runs smoothly, and I only got slight lag when battles became even more chaotic. Speaking of battles, one of the best things about the battles are the Synergy attacks which chain special attacks for more damage output, though not as cool as the fusion attacks in the previous game.

The AI is actually competent, when one of my heroes went down and I couldn’t get to them the AI would step in. Along with boosting up special attacks players will utilize Isotope crystals to boost their character’s stats. It takes some experimentation when deconstructing crystals for materials and using them to create stronger crystals but its well worth the time. There are several colors, each focusing on a different stat and my preference was to give each character a different color so that they’d be more proficient in that one area. For Hulk I focused more on durability, and Captain Marvel I focused on energy.
There’s plenty of room for replayability. In fact, there’s so much in terms of content that it’s crazy. Infinity offers tons and tons of challenges rewarding players with extra characters, unlockable costumes, artwork, and items to level up. Plenty of extra characters to unlock, both through in-game missions and downloadable content. Then there’s the difficulty. Nothing compares to struggling through a playthrough, then going through it again to completely dominate. But going through it at a higher difficulty brings such a challenge.

Like the previous game, the lack of customization is appalling especially since the game offers so much in terms of content. The costumes look neat until they don’t. Most of the unlocked outfits are just carbon copies of the original except with a different color scheme. And the fact that they don’t have added effects is just garbage. Also, there is the significant lack of moves. Each character only has four special moves. Yes, they make the characters feel unique, but four moves limit any compacity of experimentation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to utilize the multiplayer aspect so I can comment on it. Still, it’s a great in terms of replayability and gameplay. (5 out of 5)

The Verdict: In the end, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is just a great game. I like the first two games, but I think this is the best entry. There’s a lot to love about this game. The story is good, there are a lot of memorable characters, the gameplay is great, a lot of unlockable content, with so much replayability. Yeah, there are some things that could’ve been done better but it doesn’t take away from the experience. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order gets 4 out of 5.