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A remaster that came out of nowhere, Marvel Ultimate Alliance and its sequel arrive on current-gen consoles (with a PC port of the sequel) but it's fair to say that the experience falls well short. The extent of the disappointment is as variable as the quality of the ports themselves and indeed the platform you choose to play them on. Uneven frame-rates and some horrific bugs show up the lack of polish embellished on these conversions and to be frank, we deserved so much more.And when we talk about variation in quality between the quality of the ports, we aren't joking. There's a massive difference between the first two games, with the original offering up shaky performance levels while bizarrely, the sequel delivers far more consistent frame-rates. Both games run at native 1080p on PS4 and Xbox One with post-process anti-aliasing in play. This lends the presentation a smoother, more refined look over the 1080p mode found in the first Ultimate Alliance on PS3, which operated with the full pixel count but utilised no AA at all. A similar set-up is also present on PC, where graphical settings are limited to high, medium, and low presets, though you can of course adjust resolution and toggle v-sync.
For the most part all three versions share the same level of asset and effects quality, although there are some differences in places. For example, shadows are unfiltered on Xbox One and PC in the first game, leading to pixelation around these elements, while normal maps are handled differently in the sequel on Microsoft's console, with brickwork appearing slightly flatter as a result.
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