Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order

I'm loving this game. As a huge Marvel fan this game rules. It does a really good job of mixing up the MCU (including TV shows) with the comics. And I mean, it rules seeing the X-Men right there alongside the Avengers in a 2019 game.

I've been basically mixing up my team at every SHIELD point just because it's fun to see the different team compositions. So far, my favorites to play as have been Scarlett Witch and Spider-Gwen. I thought for sure that Elektra was going to join the team after that boss battle against the hand, but nope. Bummer.

Right now I'm up to the fight against Ultron which I've lost 3 times. I never had a game over until that point. It's like... I know what to do but I'm just not doing it right. Current team is Scarlet Witch, Gamora, Wasp and Captain Marvel.

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Beat the Ultron boss battle last night, but didn't have much time to play beyond that. It was all about being patient and methodical. Although, it was definitely a situation where I would have benefited from co-op. There were times I wanted to say to the three CPU teammates, "hey, dudes, we've done this battle a few times now. You know the pattern of those laser beams. How are you still walking into them?"

And this Ultron hurdle did bring to light my one real complaint about the game: while it's constantly throwing new characters at you, it doesn't do a great job at encouraging you to experiment with them. Given that any characters not currently in your party don't share experience, it means that at some point you get in a spot where you either need to stick with your leveled up ones in order to feel like you're scaled, or else you're using a bunch of un-leveled characters. I suppose that using those augment ISO8 things can help, or you could technically throw one low-level into the team with three high levels, but that definitely makes boss battles much more frustrating. I guess I could technically go back and replay levels to grind. If I felt like grinding. Which I don't right now, as it'll sort of kill the momentum of this rollercoaster.

Anyway, it's just annoying because I was enjoying constantly swapping out party members to experiment with different teams, but now I'm starting to feel like I need to mostly stick to one lineup. Scarlet Witch and Spider-Gwen are my two for-sure keepers. And it kind of sucks because I never bothered to level up Iron Man, Thor, Hulk or Captain America so now they're super under-leveled. Oh well.

Complaints aside, I think this is a fantastic game.

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Played a bit more over the weekend. Really enjoying this game. I do think that you're fandom of Marvel will add or subtract points accordingly. For me it's like, "oh nice now we're at Xaviar's school!" and "haha! Deadpool's making tacos!" so it works in the game's favor. I glanced at IGN's table of contents for their walkthrough to get an idea of how far I am in the story. I'm apparently wrapping up chapter 6 of 10.

I've definitely found that getting a grip on the various special moves - especially team ones - is huge in this game. Staggering bosses is also a big thing to learn. My current team is Scarlet Witch, Spider-Gwen, Psylocke and Deadpool.

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Alright so I'm at a boss battle at the end of Dr. Strange's area, and it feels like a bit of a wall. This is where my previous complaints feel like they're really coming into play. So the issue is really that just playing the story doesn't seem to scale you *enough,* especially if you've been swapping out party members. I suppose if you're only adding the newest (so highest level) characters to your party it'd be doable. Or if you stuck w/ the starting party and grinded them the full story, maybe? But REALLY it feels like in this game you HAVE to spend time outside of the story mode doing the Infinity Trials or replaying levels to grind for XP. And that's a thorn in my side.

My gaming time lately is super precious. And the story mode is like a really fun rollercoaster ride. To me, I don't want to break that momentum doing side stuff. I played a few Infinity Trials last night and it all felt really boring to me. It's mostly just replaying pieces of levels you already did but with conditions to earn a letter grade rating. From that you get stars and unlocks. But I mean, it just feels like going back and slogging through stuff you already did in a way to make the game longer. I'm not feeling that.

What I wanted - and obviously, developers need to cater to just ME (sarcasm) - is something like Diablo III where I can just level up as I go and always feel scaled to the game. So this roadblock is kind of turning me off right now. Which is a bummer because I actually love the story mode itself, probably more so than any reviewer I've read critique the game. I think I'll be taking a break for now.