Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

Much like the muddled, sophomoric comic story it draws inspiration from, it's a waste of a potentially intriguing idea, content to pose vague questions of morality and free will before hurriedly reverting to generic expectations to avoid following through on any of the difficult answers. The choice of available heroes is carefully scripted, with new allies joining at the same point in both plot threads, so there's never any real decision involved. I had harboured foolish dreams that maybe we'd get something a bit more open-ended, where you could travel the Marvel Universe and recruit the heroes of your choice by using the right characters to talk them around, or performing side-quests.

The illusion of choice persists in the dialogue scenes, where you'll be given three options corresponding to aggressive, diplomatic or defensive responses. The script even changes to reflect existing relationships between characters, but when you play the same scene again, with different characters, you soon realise that the other character's responses are always the same and the only reason to opt for a different approach is to grind towards one of the bonuses awarded for making a certain number of attitude choices.

It is, at least, a passable dungeon-crawl even if the formula is showing its age. Developed by Vicarious Visions, which handled the PSP and Wii ports of the last game, there's certainly enjoyment to be had in the gleefully destructive environments and action-packed pacing. The camera is clumsy, collision detection is a little woolly, and it's too easy to lose track of where you are in the middle of a superhero scrum, but much like its beefier stars this is a game more interested in cathartic impact than detail and finesse. Hammer those buttons, send the bad guys flying, trash the scenery. Job done. And it works, up to a point. Anyone who has waited patiently since 2006 for another punch-drunk scramble through Marvel's roster will certainly be amused, or at least distracted, but there's an undercurrent of disappointment that is hard to ignore.

Although it has the same number of playable characters as the last game, it's a less than inspiring line-up this time and it feels smaller as a result. Obviously, there's a need to make space for the heavy hitters like Spidey, the Fantastic Four and various X-Men, but where the previous game filled in the blanks with esoteric choices like Doctor Strange, Moon Knight and Silver Surfer, this time we get rubbish new characters like Songbird and Speedball's terrible emo makeover, Penance. Your mileage may vary depending on how attached you are to the quirkier corners of comicdom, but for this old-school True Believer it was really only Green Goblin who seemed like a cool new playable addition to the series.

The same problem afflicts the levels. Last time we got a bona fide tour of the entire Marvel Universe, spinning a yarn that took our heroes from New York to Atlantis, from Mephisto's supernatural underworld to outer space locations like the Shi'ar Empire and the Skrull homeworld. Along the way there were battles with Fin Fang Foom and Galactus, even a trivia quiz against MODOK. It was an embarrassment of riches for Marvel fans, and this generosity helped to mask the sometimes clunky gameplay.