As many of us nerds know, there has always been a harsh battle between comic juggernauts Marvel and DC. It has spanned almost 50 years and every kind of media you can think of, and video games are no exception. With X-Men Legends and it's sequel as successful as they were, the formula of "dungeon crawler RPG + superheroes = awesome" was public, and both comics wanted to capitalize on it. Thus, in 2006 two games came out: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and Justice League Heroes.
Alliance was developed by Raven Software, the guys who had made the Legends games, and strangely enough Voyager: Elite Force and Jedi Outcast, while Heroes was made by Snowblind, known for their dungeon crawlers Baldur's Gate II and Champions of Norrath. Now how do they stack up against eachother? Well, after playing through both, it's time for these games to go head to head!
Before I begin, let me preface with two things: yes, I do prefer Marvel over DC, but I have no resentment for DC in the slightest, and I played Alliance off a UMD and Heroes off my memory card ($9.99 on PSN), so I will address that later on.
Now, let's start off with a very simple headcount for both games. Alliance's gameplay lets you play as any four characters you have at once with each hero being assigned to a direction on the d-pad (in conjunction with the L trigger), with 27 heroes in all to choose from, with nine of them being unlockable. Heroes has you playing as two characters which are predetermined in the first two thirds of the game that you switch between with up on the d-pad, with 14 heroes to choose from, with seven of them unlockable. Yeah, you can kind of tell where this is going already. With the character options, Alliance lets you feel like you're in control of your party, picking out who exactly is going to be in your squad, and formulating some sort of plan for how all these characters mesh together. Plus, it's fun finding little bonuses for putting together certain teams, like if you have all of the Fantastic Four, you gain extra health every time you knock out an enemy, or if you have all girls, you get a +5% to damage, or you can make your own team, level them up, and give them the bonuses you want. Heroes just doesn't get this part of the experience. The entire first half of the game feels like you're being forced to play as every character you have simply because they're afraid you won't use them otherwise because you don't recognize them, and there is no special bonus for having a certain pair. This was a chance for DC to give it's lesser known characters a bit of love, and have you feel a sort of connection with them, even if that connection is just "this one's awesome!" I mean, hell, Alliance has Ronin, Captain Marvel, Deadpool, Hawkeye, and Spider-Woman, and these are characters only big comic book fans would have heard of prior. (Note that 2006 was before the giant flood of Deadpool we have now) While alternate versions of the heroes are presented as costumes, The Flash gets an old Jay Garrick costume, and Superman has his Earth 2 look, three of the unlockable characters in Heroes are just different models of existing characters, with the Kyle Rayner GL and Hal Jordan GL playing exactly the same as John Stewart, and Supergirl being Superman without one of his powers, but I'll get to powers later. So while it is fun to play as your favorite heroes, DC's contribution is missing many fan favorites like Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel (a different one, you might know him as the misnomer "Shazam"), Starman, The Question, and Lobo, which puts it a step behind Alliance.
Time for a graphics check. Both games have a remarkable amount of detail in their world, with every new stage feeling different than the ones before it. The characters all look great in both the in-game animation and the cut scenes... well, not the cut scenes for Heroes. The one thing I still can't get over in Heroes is how creepy most of the faces look. Sure, Zatana has a nice face, and Stewart looks like his strong self, but Wonder Woman looks emaciated, and Superman is just plastic. While Marvel's characters have a simple design, they at least still look visually appealing. It might be on a design choice though. While Alliance has a good balance between cartoony and realistic with all of it's character designs, the ones in Heroes either lean way too far to trying to be realistic or the opposite way to be only designed in a comic book universe. And Brainiac doesn't even look like Brainiac! They gave him a super-saturated green and purple color scheme and made him much more mechanical than he was in most of the comics and the animated series he was a part of. They even took away that circle-V-thing from his forehead! He just looks like a Lex Luthor suit now. The levels are good looking on both games, but the design of the levels feels much more seamless in Alliance than it was in Heroes. Every room you lurk through in Alliance feels like it has a purpose other than supplying you with more baddies or being where you fight a boss, where as Heroes has a contrived linear trail for the most part with areas copy and pasted from other parts of the same map. Mars especially feels lifeless, but then again, it is Mars...
With the two games coming from two different developers and comic universes, the controls are surprisingly the same. X is your light attack, O is your heavy attack, and you string these together into combos. Square is to pick up and interact with objects, and triangle is to jump, and pressing it a second time will net you either a double jump or flight. Pressing start brings up the pause screen, pressing select is your hero details page, the d-pad controls your team AI, and the nub is for movement. That's quite the similarities. But of course, there are differences in the playing style of each. The most frustrating thing about Heroes vs Alliance is that camera control is almost non-existent in Heroes, whereas it is seamless and with complete control in Alliance. As for actual gameplay, in Alliance, while you have at least ten abilities at your disposal, you can only have four shortcuts at a time, leading you to have to think about which powers to have at your disposal. Fortunately for those of us who prefer our powers on the fly, you can use the d-pad to switch what powers are slotted to your four face buttons, but this takes a bit of time and getting used to, so I just never used it at all. In Heroes, each super hero has only five powers maximum at their disposal, with three being unlocked from the start, and the other two needing to be unlocked through applying points to them after leveling up. This is where I got kind of annoyed with Heroes. What's with the short list? Why can I only do so much with a Green Lantern ring, and where's Superman's super-speed, and what about Martian Manhunter's eye beam thingies?
While I would have liked more variety in what powers my heroes had, it did seem like there were a few stand out powers that could just take on anything, like Superman's heat vision, which does constant damage, knocks enemies back, lights them on fire, and is something that you start out with. Or Green Lantern's "rock crushers" as they're referred to, which also do constant damage on a higher scale, and stun the enemy with each hit so they can't retaliate. These two characters I feel like could have blown through the game no problem on their own, which brings me to another problem with the powers. In Alliance, there's a certain balance to them, so as to help out the group when needed, whether it be applying extra damage, boosting stats, de-buffing enemies, every character has a couple of abilities that can focus on the group, whereas Heroes, everyone can pretty much solo besides Zatana, who is the uber-support of the group. She heals, she sets fire traps, she slows down time, creates shields, and turns enemies into bunnies for short periods to get them out of the way. Those are all hers, and only hers. The only other support-ish attacks are Green Lantern's "play pen" as I call it, that traps enemies in a box to be dealt with or left alone, and Superman's freeze breath which can immobilize enemies, giving you a bit of a breather. With all these abilities going around, you'd think there'd be a balance between characters. Nope. Superman is supremely overpowered with a base attack starting higher than any other character, and said game-breaking power, and guess who the least useful character in the game is?... BATMAN! I swear to God, this is the one game that doesn't make me want to play as the Dark Knight, even though he's voiced by amazing actor Ron Perlman of Hellboy fame. You see, Batman has the second lowest strength, and no good super powers. Sure, he's got a bat-a-rang and the grappling hook can close the distance between enemies, but when I can keep them at bay with a never ending beam of pure heat, that's not really useful. I personally could not find such distaste in playing a character in Alliance. Each hero can be put in a category, such as tank, striker, ranger, and mage (all names not used in the game, but you get the idea), and can be easily swapped out with another character from that category. While this sounds like most characters are the same, there are subtle enough differences to where you will find that good team.
Powers themselves are leveled up in Alliance via a very linear skill system, which keeps your powers at a relatively similar level to your characters, meaning no one power could completely dominate the rest. Heroes also has a linear skill system, but also integrates attack, health, energy, and regeneration into the mix, and I'll talk about the regeneration more later. Now, Legends had a separate point system for changing each heroes stats to your liking, which I loved, but Heroes makes you choose between powers and stats, and Alliance gets rid of it all together. While I can see Heroes not using something like it so as to distance themselves from Marvel in that "oh, we're not copying them" sort of way, it's sad to see Raven take away one of the more important parts of the character building from a series they had already established. It feels like an unnecessary dumbing down of a successful formula for no good reason. Another thing about the skill system in Heroes is that with each point you give to a power or stat, you can assign a modifier such as Luck, Damage, and Range to that point. This gives the idea of customization, but I only used them on, guess what, Superman's heat vision, and they proved to be unnecessary for the most part.
Quick bit about equipping: Heroes has no equipment, and Alliance each hero can only have one piece of equipment on them at a time. This means there is no defense boost for Heroes at all, and this is a massive point against the character building in Heroes. Again, the problem with Alliance is that the entire character building process is dumbed down, where you used to have three different pieces each character to wear in Legends, only one is allowed in Alliance.
Like everything else about their universes, the stories are on opposite sides of the spectrum in almost every way. Alliance has a fairly deep story that involves lots of characters both well known and obscure (there's a whole level centered around Arcade!), but at the same time, everyone you talk to practically rambles on about their life story and most of their history, or plot points you already heard from other people. Now, you can avoid most of these conversations by not talking to people, but then you can miss out on some bonus missions for extra exp. Meanwhile, Heroes has a super simplistic, almost stupid plot that makes you ask a great big "Why?" every time something happens. There's only a couple of well known baddies in DC's game, and all the more obscure villains are given no back story or real reason for being there, with the exception of Gorilla Grodd, who had a decent reasoning and was the first really good level of the game.
I spent about the same amount of time on both games, about 10 hours each, and on Heroes I finished the game and bought most of the characters, while I only got halfway through Alliance. There's close to no replayability for Heroes, aside from a lame challenge mode that's unlocked after beating the game and is just the old levels, but this time you choose your heroes. Thanks for making us beat the game before giving us freedom.
I wasn't able to try out the multiplayer portion, seeing as none of my friends were willing to buy the game on such short notice. However, Heroes has no multiplayer, despite having two characters on screen at once and all other ports of the game receiving a co-op mode, and Alliance has an online mode!... well, had an online mode. The servers formerly dedicated to both multiplayer action and stat-tracking have been shut down and the service no longer exists. This won't stop the game from repeatedly asking you if you want to log in to their server, though. Local multiplayer still exists, so again, point Marvel.
While having a super heroic dungeon crawler is great, the more I look at these two side by side, the more their faults show. Justice League Heroes could never be as good as it's counterpart, and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance feels like it's gameplay was stripped of some of it's best components. If you really want a good superhero RPG, Ultimate Alliance is a great play worth your money and time, but if you hate Marvel with a fiery passion, Justice League Heroes is still a decent play.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance: 8/10
Justice League Heroes: 6/10
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