Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: Heroes for Hire
What’s up, true believers? If you’ve been a Marvel fan who wanted something besides formulaic Lego games that have felt the same for well over a decade starring your favorite superheroes, there haven’t been many options. Sure, Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 is pretty spectacular, but that’s one game starring one superhero. Good Marvel games have just been few and far between for a long time now.
However, Marvel fans who also own a Nintendo Switch arguably got what they’ve been asking for in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, an exclusive for Nintendo’s incredibly popular console hybrid. A continuation of a series that hadn’t seen a new entry in nearly fifteen years. It didn’t break new ground. If anything, it was very much like the last couple of games, But hey we hadn’t had one of those is awhile and it did what it set out to do and I had a lot of fun with the 20 or so hours I spent reviewing it last year. I would still recommend it for most Marvel fans (though maybe wait for a sale since it’s been out for a minute if you have other things to play).
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 also had a season pass that would add three packs of characters along with additional content to play over time. The third and final of these packs released this past Thursday, featuring Marvel’s first family, The Fantastic Four, and an epilogue to the campaign of the main game featuring Doctor Doom. I hadn’t bothered with any of the season pass stuff because hey, 2019 was a very busy time for video games. Right now is a pretty busy time to, but was up for an excuse to get back into Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and the release of this last bit of DLC seemed like a good reason so I bought the season pass.
So if you buy the season pass now what does that get you? Some extra challenge modes, the aforementioned epilogue and twelve new heroes to play with. Here’s the insulting catch though: even though you paid your $20 for these heroes, you have to still work for them. They aren’t just available to you. I think this is utterly ridiculous. Sure, there are hidden characters in the main game, but you get access to a large roster already and a full game so those are a side bonus.
For this DLC, I am specifically paying for these characters. The $20 I paid should be all I need to do to unlock them. The Fantastic Four themselves are the lesser of the offenders here, you just have to beat the first level of the epilogue story DLC and you have access to them. But the X-Men characters, Moon Knight, Blade, Morbius, & The Punisher all require you to complete increasingly difficult gauntlet challenges to just unlock them. Again, I already paid for these characters, specifically to use these characters and now you expect me to do quite frankly a lot of hard extra work just to use them? That’s not good DLC at all. Let me just have the characters and if I want to engage with those extra modes at all that should be my choice. Lock some costumes or something behind those challenges sure, but not the new characters I want to play with, it’s completely motivational. I don’t want to bother unlocking them and that makes me not want to play the game.
As far as the story DLC goes? It’s pretty intriguing with Doom attempting to steal the Infinity Stones for himself, but not for the reasons you would think (which teases a possible sequel). I haven’t actually finished the DLC though and might not any time real soon. Here’s why: for some reason, they decided to have laser drones firing lasers in a pattern you must fly and/or jump through to proceed past a certain point. The jumping/flying is pretty floaty in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 but most of it does not require any sort of precision jumping/flying, This does and while it is possible to get through it is incredibly frustrating and just makes you want to throw your Switch/pro controller out the window. These lasers also do lots of damage to your characters so while you might make it through you may also be left undermanned until you can manage to get to a SHIELD checkpoint.
Eventually, I’ll give it another go but it’s awful and makes the DLC pretty awful by extension. I can still wholeheartedly recommend the main Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 game especially if you need a new game to kill time with but I’d pass on the DLC unless you are actually desperate to have these 12 characters in your roster for some reason.
That’s all for today, see ya real soon!
