A couple of weeks ago Chuckstudbuckle, Dornorn and I completed our long running co-op campaign on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It's been a regular mostly-weekly thing for several months now. Here's my review of the game from 2006 or so.

Chuck had had the game for a while and suddenly picked it up to try it out. I joined in for my first attempt at the co-op campaign and we re-started from the beginning. We'd been finding the Medium difficulty a little too easy so we up-ed the difficulty to Hard, whereupon we immediately started to struggle with the mini-boss fights. Dornorn saw us playing and wanted to join in too, once he found out a little about the game. He had a shuffle around by himself to suss out the basics of the game before we once again started over on Hard difficulty, the regular group formed. Noisecrime briefly expressed some interest in trying it out too, but ultimately decided to pass for Battlefield: Bad Company as I recall.

The three of us struggled through the early parts of the Hard campaign when we found that Dornorn's chosen character, Deadpool, had a health regeneration ability which was proving a winning skill. Neither Chuck or I had that as a feature of our characters from The Fantastic Four, namely Thing and Human Torch. Instead we relied upon smacking foes to earn health and energy globes. This was fine for normal minions, but the mini-bosses were often too difficult for us and we'd end up watching Dornorn slowly wittle them down on his own while frequently blocking and waiting for his health to recharge. At one point Chuck was even off watching some football match while this happened, against Mephisto I think it was, resulting in a running joke for the next few months.

At this point Chuck and I decided that a change was required. After looking up the entire hero roster we identified several other superheroes that featured automatically regenerating health amongst their various costume-based abilities. Chuck chose Wolverine and I went in with Moon Knight, whom I'd never heard of before. This transformed our survival ability and meant that we made fairly rapid progress from here on in. There were still many a tough boss fight, however, several of which often wiped me out. This was partly because Moon Knight's health regeneration was far, far slower than either Deadpool or Wolverine, even after I levelled up that particular ability, and partly because of being rubbish! We'd also added Ghost Rider to our party because he has the ability to automatically resurrect fallen heroes, and himself, on a 50% chance once we'd maxed out that skill. This meant we were often back in the fight immediately, but not always. In fact I had to watch the final, final battle because both Moon Knight and Ghost Rider were wiped out early on.

Anyway, a game I thoroughly enjoyed on a repeat run - the raw power of co-op - and one I definitely appreciated better after I got proper control over the moves and powers of my character. I soon found out what abilities I liked to use, boosted their level up, and used them at appropriate times. In fact we were discovering new ways to use our characters right through to the end when I found out I had the ability to augment the map overlay with enemy positions within a nearby radius via my buff ability. Very useful. Why we never noticed that until near the end I don't know!