Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - The "Showdown"

So the heroes are happily fighting each other, but no one is really gaining ground in this stupid conflict. So the Pro team comes up with a great idea to lure the Anti team into a trap. The Pro team makes it seems like a chemical plant has a massive leak and amazingly enough the entire Anti team show up! I guess Captain America is just that gullible. Needless to say a large fight breaks out.

There are a lot of boss fights on this level. It's enough to really drive a person mad. During my first playthrough this was probably the toughest level to beat. This is in large part that there seems to be only one healer in the game and that's Iron Fist. Seriously! Iron Fist is the only guy I can find with a healing ability. The only other way to heal is to find red orbs (not that common during a boss fight) or to use an energy token, but you can only hold two of those. This is one of those ideas where I just want to scream at the guy who came up with it. Healing is a pretty essential ability. I would really like to have it at my disposal.

And that's where I learned how broken Deadpool was. While this applies more to my first playthrough than my current playthrough I feel that it's worth talking about. During this level all of my team had died due to the number of boss fights and the lack of healing abilities. All of team, that is, except for Deadpool. Deadpool proceeded to take down Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Venom, and Green Goblin all by himself.

You see, Deadpool has this self-healing ability. Sure Wolverine has it too, but Deadpool can strike from a distance, Wolverine would have to get up-close-and-personal and he would then get clobbered. Even better, Deadpool can teleport over an enemy, drop poisoned grenades, and then teleport back to safety. I made ample use of this move during these fights and Deadpool earned himself a permanent place in my party. Yes, Deadpool is that awesome and that broken.

Now I mentioned that there was a fight against Venom and Green Goblin. This is actually where the game completely jumps-ship from the comic book version of the Civil War storyline. If you remember the Pro team injected villains with Nanonites. Well the villains apparently break their leashes and try to kill everyone. Thankfully Nick Fury shows up to save the day. An entire army of Nick Furys show up. I think every generic soldier in both armies were actually Nick Fury robots. So Fury helps your current team stop the villains from killing everyone. The only problem, neither Captain America or Iron Man believe Fury when he tells them about the villains going rogue. Seriously, who didn't see this coming?

Fury recovers the team you were controlling and enlists them to help him stop the villains. So he sends you off to prison so he can gain access to the info on the Nanonites controlling the villains. Again a pretty simple level. You meet Penance here. Penance is a hero who used to be known as Speedball. Speedball was part of the New Warriors group that caused the massive explosion that started this stupid war. Penance is one of the many characters in the game that I just don't care about. He can feel sorry all he wants and it won't matter to me. I had him in my party long enough to get his alternate costume and then I kicked him out.

So you have to actually enter the Negative Zone and Prison 42 to acquire a fresh sample of Nanonites. This whole thing plays out with an incredibly boring level of  predictability. It's like they aren't even trying to make things interesting and it's driving me crazy! Can you guess what happens next? I bet you can!

If you guessed that all of the villains are freed from prison, then you would be right. All of the villains escape from prison. And they go out of control and start killing everyone around them. Iron Man and Captain America finally believe Fury that the Nanonite controlled villains are uncontrollable. Yeah, they don't see it until it punches them in the face. Way to be great heroes guys. This story line sucks. I wonder how the comics handled it?

I'm still in the prison. It's been a couple of days since I've played. I'll get back to it soon.